Re: My XEmacs wish list

4. Extension language replacement Yes, this bogeyman has reared his head again. The first stumbling block is *which* extension language to replace Elisp with. There are lots of candidates; the choice is not easy. Personally, I favor staying close to Lisp in order to minimize the porting effort. Either Scheme or Common Lisp would be a good way to go. But maybe it doesn't matter. The C code is so full of Elisp dependencies that it would have to undergo major surgery, no matter what the final extension language. And even changing to Scheme or Common Lisp won't save us from having to rewrite all of the Elisp in both core and the packages. My big fear here is that we would be doomed to the fate of perlmacs. Whatever happened to Guilized Emacs?

In any case, this is a dangerous road to go down, because it means that almost everything has to be rewritten, and it dooms any further efforts to sync with Emacs. The benefits are the potential for better performance (although it would be easy to fail to realize that potential) and the possibility of attracting more developers due to choosing a more widely known language (Javamacs, anyone?).