Guile-Emacs Relaunched (opens in new tab)

I cannot speak to nice graphics (I don't want a different way to represent directory trees or git branches, I'm happy with how it's done today), but on the count of Magit's speed... it's not really the problem of the language. It's the problem of how the program is written. Well, maybe in a way it is also the language. With some languages you have more room to be sloppy, with Emacs Lisp, when used in this way, you have to be very careful.

In my experience with Magit, the slowness usually comes from a large number of subprocess calls that are made to render some aggregated piece of information. Eg. some table that has a bunch of commit hashes, but then the way it's rendered, the hashes are links that need to have, as part of the link, some information embedded in them that's only available through a separate subprocess call, one per commit hash... Emacs Lisp obviously adds some overhead, but the larger problem is the need to make these dozens of subprocess calls.

I don't think there's an immediate solution to this problem though. Most likely, in specific cases where this amplification of subprocess calls Tartius (or whoever mans the project today) needs to rethink the buffer layout, make things load lazily, maybe add some caching... but this isn't going to happen quickly. On the bright side, these changes do happen every now and then. In the end of the day, I use Magit almost exclusively today, I even have my extensions to Magit (specifically for Git grep command), and I wouldn't trade it for any other Git interface. I wish it was better, but I haven't found anything that would've been better in practical terms.

emacs is a lot faster now that it uses a JIT elisp compiler by default. I don’t really think switching to a different runtime will make much of a difference there.

this is my concern as well, i think vim wins for a lot of folks because of latency and that an emacs successor should prioritize performance and low ux-interruptions in it's values and culture. fwiw, i'm much more comfortable optimizing atop guile's bytecode than elisp.

Previous attempts at guile-emacs weren't faster: fixing the impedance mismatch between elisp and guile ate all the speedup that guile would bring.

Also as a significant change since the last attempt, elisp got a proper native compiler.

Wow that's some high praise. For anyone wondering, Hoot is a Scheme to WebAssembly compiler that is really cool (and also I'm one of the devs and also I don't live in a monastery.)

https://spritely.institute/hoot/

I really wish folks building these things in Scheme would build them instead in Lisp. Common Lisp is a better language for systems, despite a few design decisions which turn out to have been howling mistakes (the single worst is the default reader upcasing).

In a kind of tragic irony of sorts, we now have VSCode (Electron based, similar in resource consumption as when Emacs was new, hence the "eight megabytes and constantly swapping" joke), using JavaScript as extension language, which was supposed to be originally based on Scheme.

i am not user of emacs, but looking into as next switch.

using mainstream more structured language is good point go into emacs.

it also will lead to rewrite of some plugins. for example many rust rewrites just better c versions, but more consistent and structured. there was not reason not to rewrite these in c but better. very good for newcomers to unix world.

another point is async. i have heard that is one of problems of no async. if emacs has plan it could be intresting either doing async or properly avoiding. for me it is prove point emacs will not die with its creators.

I'd also highlight the work that's being done here:

https://codeberg.org/lyrra/guilemacs

> And with Andrea's elispjit the guile port is probably not needed at all.

Performance aside, there's more to Guile Emacs: possibility of true concurrency, incremental garbage collection, cleaner separation of the interpreter and UI components, better maintained in the long run...

It would allow using any language that runs on the Guile VM. Guile has a compiler tower model where you define languages and their path towards being lowered to bytecode. The main language, Scheme, lowers to the Tree-IL language (high-level intermediate representation), then to the CPS language (low-level IR), and finally to bytecode. Elisp lowers to Tree-IL, which means from there it takes the same path as Scheme does to reach bytecode, so it gets to benefit from all the performance optimizations happening in Tree-IL (like partial evaluation) and CPS (which are numerous, like common subexpression elimination, contification, dead code elimination, etc.) It's a pretty neat system where all these different languages can intermingle in a pleasing way.