Re: An idea, now that we have dynamic loading

[Óscar Fuentes]

"John Wiegley" <address@hidden> writes:

> It occurred to me today that we have tons of examples of how Lisp functions
> can be written in a flavor C. This "compilation" is typically done by hand by
> a few experts.
>
> However, what if we had a compiler from Emacs Lisp -> Lisp-flavored C, which
> could turn .el files into .c files suitable for compiling into .so's that can
> be loaded into Emacs?

Mandatory mention:

JIT Compilation for Emacs

http://tromey.com/blog/?p=982

IMHO and based on my experience with other projects, this is the way
Elisp should go for improving performance. It is dubious that the
approach you mention would be any better on terms of raw performance,
apart from decreasing load time. Anyways, if speed is really important,
nothing beats a pure C implementation.