Re: Preprocessor
Martin Buchholz <martin(a)xemacs.org> writes:
This is a very EASY translator to write compared to some of the
other
projects being considered.
Yes.
The hard part is integrating this into xemacs.
I'm not convinced that integration is harder than writing the
translator, but anyway...
Like figuring out the shared object loading mechanism across
platforms. Should all the package lisp be compiled to .so at
installation time, or should there be a JIT that optimizes hotspots
at run-time (it would have to call the compiler transparently to do
so, however).
The former. I hate the JIT idea, especially in the context of Emacs!
Don't expect it to be a huge win, however. All the optimized
machine
code will take up more memory than the bytecodes. And many elisp
operations like (setq i (1+ i)) will not be compilable to C i++,
I never expect such an optimization because we don't have lexical
scoping, declarations, type inference, etc. But I still believe that
even without that optimization the translator would be a huge win.