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FYI thecloudlet, the last quote from a Reddit user at the end seems to have duplicated content (copy-paste error?) I read both articles and am looking forward

FYI thecloudlet, the last quote from a Reddit user at the end seems to have duplicated content (copy-paste error?) I read both articles and am looking forward to your next! I’d be interested in understanding more about the relationship of EMacs to GCC since you noted the authors were the same and the internals were written with some compiler awareness.

thecloudlet 7mo ago
Thank you for the kind reminder! I have removed the duplicate. You made a great point. Since the original authors are the same, the fundamentals of the Emacs C core are indeed highly compiler-optimized. I hope I can come up with a way to fully understand and write about that history and relationship. (But to be honest, diving into that level of compiler history is a really hard topic to tackle!) Thanks for the great inspiration and for taking the time to read!
- _dky 7mo ago
  One similarity I noticed was the intermediate representation from GCC frontend looks and feels very Lispy. Could be just a coincidence too.
  - vintagedave 7mo ago
    That is fascinating. I never never seen GCC IR, only LLVM IR, which to me is more assembly-like in a generic no-specific-machine kind of way. I (briefly) searched for more info but this SO answer[0] implies they're quite similar. I'd be interested in understanding more. I feel like much of computer science has normalised to specific approaches that 'won' in the industry, where Lisp is an example of something interesting that largely didn't win -- with notable exceptions like HN itself! [1] :) And so hearing about uses of things like Lisp concepts in areas we might not know they're being used would be wonderful HN content. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40799696/how-is-gcc-ir-different-from-llvm-ir https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40799696/how-is-gcc-ir-d... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43089415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43089415

thecloudlet 7mo ago

Thank you for the kind reminder! I have removed the duplicate. You made a great point. Since the original authors are the same, the fundamentals of the Emacs C core are indeed highly compiler-optimized. I hope I can come up with a way to fully understand and write about that history and relationship. (But to be honest, diving into that level of compiler history is a really hard topic to tackle!) Thanks for the great inspiration and for taking the time to read!

_dky 7mo ago
One similarity I noticed was the intermediate representation from GCC frontend looks and feels very Lispy. Could be just a coincidence too.
- vintagedave 7mo ago
  That is fascinating. I never never seen GCC IR, only LLVM IR, which to me is more assembly-like in a generic no-specific-machine kind of way. I (briefly) searched for more info but this SO answer[0] implies they're quite similar. I'd be interested in understanding more. I feel like much of computer science has normalised to specific approaches that 'won' in the industry, where Lisp is an example of something interesting that largely didn't win -- with notable exceptions like HN itself! [1] :) And so hearing about uses of things like Lisp concepts in areas we might not know they're being used would be wonderful HN content. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40799696/how-is-gcc-ir-different-from-llvm-ir https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40799696/how-is-gcc-ir-d... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43089415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43089415