Re: GSoC: Emacs Lisp support for GNU Guile

[Neil Jerram]

Daniel Kraft <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> as already discussed briefly with the Guile guys behind the new VM
> thing, I got the idea to implement Emacs Lisp as supported language
> for the Guile VM system.
>
> Below is a proposal for a GSoC project I submitted to GNU as mentoring
> organization;  Karl Berry replied that it sounds interesting but they
> needed to find a mentor / mentors for this project; what do you (Emacs
> and Guile people) think about it?

Well I guess I could mentor this...  On the other hand, if anyone else
is very keen to, I'd be happy to let them!  (Simply because of time
pressure.)

Having worked on Guile/Elisp on and off for some time, I think it
would really help if you had a concrete goal in mind - i.e. something
more concrete than implementing Emacs Lisp in general on the VM.

I don't want to preempt your own ideas, but this could take the form
of

- identifying some existing (non-trivial) Emacs Lisp library or
  application

- thinking of some cool extra thing that could be done with that, if
  it was combined with Guile (and maybe other guile libraries, such as
  guile-gnome)

- then the concrete goal would be to get Elisp/VM working well enough
  to run that existing Elisp code and do the cool extra thing.

If you followed this kind of approach, note that it would also need
work - in addition to the Elisp/VM translation - to implement whatever
Emacs primitives the Elisp code relies on.  That would make the
project as a whole less pure-language-translation, but (in my view)
more real and useful.

What do you think?

Regards,

    Neil