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I remember reading a while ago about an initiative to switch Emacs elisp implementation to use Guile backend. I haven't been watching that closely. Does anyone

I remember reading a while ago about an initiative to switch Emacs elisp implementation to use Guile backend. I haven't been watching that closely. Does anyone have more information about the status of that project/initiative?

jfb 14y ago
It's dead. It never really got legs; similar projects are proposed pretty much monthly on emacs-devel only to die quietly.
- mhd 14y ago
  Yeah, it's fighting with "Let's reimplement Emacs in Common Lisp" for most often tried, yet ultimately unsuccessful project. I think there was a GSoC project recently, but haven't heard anything about its results.
  - tadfisher 14y ago
    There is Deuce [1], a project to port Emacs to Clojure. Specifically, the goal is to port the C core entirely to Clojure and replace many redundancies with JVM primitives; also, source-to-source transformation from Elisp to Clojure allows the editor to interpret Elisp on the fly. [1] https://github.com/hraberg/deuce https://github.com/hraberg/deuce
    - jfb 14y ago
      The JVM seems like a really silly target for this. OH BOY! An editor that won't behave correctly in ANY environment!
      - tadfisher 14y ago
        You might have more experience in this area than I, but is this not the point of the JVM?
        jfb 14y ago
        By targeting the JVM, you are giving up on a native user experience. Makes perfect sense when the user interface of your software is programmatic; insanity when you're trying to make software to be used by humans. Clojure is a good lisp, but hardly reason enough to toss all UI convention for. C + Guile makes about a zillion times more sense.
        tadfisher 14y ago
        I disagree; you are not tied to Swing or any Java UI toolkit merely by using Clojure on the JVM. You can just as easily integrate with a GTK, Cocoa, and whatever Windows uses. You'll notice how the current Emacs is weird on all three platforms by default (at least they switched the scrollbar position). C/Guile isn't a panacea for a UI frontend, they're entirely orthogonal.

jfb 14y ago

It's dead. It never really got legs; similar projects are proposed pretty much monthly on emacs-devel only to die quietly.

mhd 14y ago
Yeah, it's fighting with "Let's reimplement Emacs in Common Lisp" for most often tried, yet ultimately unsuccessful project. I think there was a GSoC project recently, but haven't heard anything about its results.
- tadfisher 14y ago
  There is Deuce [1], a project to port Emacs to Clojure. Specifically, the goal is to port the C core entirely to Clojure and replace many redundancies with JVM primitives; also, source-to-source transformation from Elisp to Clojure allows the editor to interpret Elisp on the fly. [1] https://github.com/hraberg/deuce https://github.com/hraberg/deuce
  - jfb 14y ago
    The JVM seems like a really silly target for this. OH BOY! An editor that won't behave correctly in ANY environment!
    - tadfisher 14y ago
      You might have more experience in this area than I, but is this not the point of the JVM?
      - jfb 14y ago
        By targeting the JVM, you are giving up on a native user experience. Makes perfect sense when the user interface of your software is programmatic; insanity when you're trying to make software to be used by humans. Clojure is a good lisp, but hardly reason enough to toss all UI convention for. C + Guile makes about a zillion times more sense.
        tadfisher 14y ago
        I disagree; you are not tied to Swing or any Java UI toolkit merely by using Clojure on the JVM. You can just as easily integrate with a GTK, Cocoa, and whatever Windows uses. You'll notice how the current Emacs is weird on all three platforms by default (at least they switched the scrollbar position). C/Guile isn't a panacea for a UI frontend, they're entirely orthogonal.