Re: emacs with guile instead of elisp

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu>]

rms@santafe.edu writes:
>     Unexec has at least one limitation that makes it difficult to use with
>     guile.  It requires the entire heap image to be statically linked.
> 
> Perhaps this means that part of making Emacs use Guile will
> be extending unexec.  (I expected it was a big job.)
> 
>     This is a problem when the standard way to add compiled C code to
>     guile is by creating a dynamically linked module.
> 
> It may be the standard way, but that doesn't mean Emacs has to work
> that way.

If I may be so bold, I'd like to suggest that the real goal is to make
Emacs start reasonably fast in the presence of large amounts of Lisp
code that need to be loaded at startup. Using unexec is merely a means
to that end which may or may not remain the best means when Emacs is
converted to using Guile. In particular, a full-featured stable native
code compiler may make loading fast enough that unexec is no longer
necessary.

 - Maciej Stachowiak