Comments on: Emacs and Common Lisp, Part 2

By: hash

hash — Thu, 31 May 2012 11:03:08 +0000

Is there any moves on this project? Could you post your code, I really want to help ?

By: tom

tom — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:34:19 +0000

>> So, if this is a repeatable translation is the idea that no CL solution could ever be accepted into the Emacs mainline, so better to periodically sync with mainline?

Yes. I don’t expect GNU will want to switch to Common Lisp. But, if translation is automated, then it won’t matter: CL is just another way to build Emacs.

>> If this were to be acceptable to GNU, then I assume a GNU CL implementation would be required?

That is for GNU to say. I’m planning to target SBCL, I think.

The requirements for the translation will be a CL system, with FFI and FFI callbacks. I’m not even 100% sure that SBCL has the latter, so I may be looking into other implementations. I’m still just working on the translator.

By: Eric Schulte

Eric Schulte — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:26:08 +0000

So, if this is a repeatable translation is the idea that no CL solution could ever be accepted into the Emacs mainline, so better to periodically sync with mainline?

If this were to be acceptable to GNU, then I assume a GNU CL implementation would be required? The only downside I see there is that most of the benefits of a CL rebase (faster GC, threading, etc…) seem to be limited to non-GNU (e.g., SBCL) common lisps.

I guess I’m asking what do you see as the long term future, and how will this not end up as another branch off the Emacs tree which is eventually abandoned (sorry to sound pessimistic as I would like to see something like this succeed).

By: Samium Gromoff

Samium Gromoff — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:22:58 +0000

I sincerely applaud you, sir.

By: The Cliffs of Inanity › Difficulties of elisp

The Cliffs of Inanity › Difficulties of elisp — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 03:36:05 +0000

[...] thesis that underlies my project to translate the Emacs C code to Common Lisp is that Emacs Lisp is close enough to Common Lisp that the parts of the Emacs C code that implement [...]

By: unsorted | Pearltrees

unsorted | Pearltrees — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:09:58 +0000

[...] The Cliffs of Inanity › Emacs and Common Lisp, Part 2 A good portion of Emacs is simply redundant in the CL world. There are a few types (cons, vector, integers, functions) that are shareable — in fact, sharing these is part of the goal of this effort. There are also a number of functions which are effectively identical. There are also entire redundant modules, like the garbage collector, or the bytecode interpreter. The question is how to have the translator differentiate between what is useful and what is not, without breaking builds of future versions of Emacs. One important fact is that we do not need to convert an arbitrary C program to Common Lisp. [...]

By: Paul Legato

Paul Legato — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:09:25 +0000

This is awesome. I eagerly await the results.

By: tom

tom — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:23:49 +0000

Haha, yeah, the Python thing is funny. The reason is just that the Python plugin for GCC is the best one:

http://tromey.com/blog/?p=714

I did try MELT once but couldn’t even get it to build; plus — yet another idiosyncratic lisp dialect, no thanks, life’s too short.

I’ll make the code available soon.

By: dtw

dtw — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:58:02 +0000

And if you publish code, choose the version control system that the potential contributors want to use: Git.

By: Scott Turner

Scott Turner — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:55:23 +0000

I find it amusing — or ironic, or something — that you’re using Python to translate C into Lisp .