Re: "Bringing GNU Emacs to Native Code" at the European Lisp Symposium

[Stefan Monnier]

>    > "The proposed compiler focuses on generating
>    >  code for the new lexically scoped dialect only,
>    >  since the dynamic one is considered obsolete
>    >  and close to deprecation."
> We might someday decide to deprecate dynamic binding mode, but that
> would be years away.  Unless/until we do so, new features in Emacs
> should support both.

I don't see such a need, no.  Old code should work as well as before,
but I think it's perfectly OK to require using Elisp/l in order to
make use of some new features.  We already do that in various cases
(e.g. `gv-ref`, `thunk.el`, `generator.el` and I'm sure there are
others).

I might argue that old code doesn't need to be compiled to native code
since it ran fast enough with the byte-code.

That doesn't mean we should discourage making the native code compiler
work with old code, but just that it's secondary.


        Stefan