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# Beguiling Emacs: Guile-Emacs relaunched!
Robin Templeton (they/them)
IRC: robin on libera.chat; Fediverse: [@lispwitch@octodon.social](https://octodon.social/@lispwitch); Matrix: [@terpri:matrix.org](https://matrix.to/#/@terpri:matrix.org); website: <http://terpri.org/>; mail: <mailto:robin@terpri.org>
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[The Guile-Emacs project](https://guile-emacs.org/) seeks to develop new
foundations for Emacs, building on forty years of development to prepare
the way for the next forty. Guile-Emacs brings Emacs and Guile together
by providing a new Elisp implementation based on Guile's compiler
technology, serving as the basis for a more expressive and extensible
version of Elisp. We envision Guile and Emacs being co-developed in a
sort of mutualism, with Emacs becoming the heart of a "Lisp machine for
the 21st century" and with Guile fulfilling the promised role of Lisp
from the GNU Manifesto.
Guile-Emacs is now being developed by a democratic workers cooperative,
focused on development of the project itself and related components of
the GNU system.
In this talk, I'll cover:
- What is Guile-Emacs, in terms of its goals and general architecture?
Why is Guile well-suited to the goals of the project?
- How did the Guile-Emacs project begin, and what is its status today?
- What are the immediate tasks for Guile-Emacs development, and how
will they improve Guile-Emacs itself as well as its component
projects?
- How are our long-term goals for Guile-Emacs connected to the spirit of
Emacs and the GNU Project in general? What do we envision for the
future of GNU Emacs?
- How can you get involved with and support this effort?
Along the way, we'll show live demos of Guile-Emacs itself and its
extensions to Emacs Lisp.
About the speaker:
Robin Templeton is a free software advocate who enjoys programming
language design and exploring system architecture. Their fascination
with Emacs and Lisp lead them to begin work on the then-hypothetical
Guile-Emacs project during their university studies. If given the
opportunity and interest, they will bless an interested listener with a
treasure trove of obscure Lisp history.
Guile-Emacs seeks to provide new foundations for Emacs, integrating
Emacs and Guile via a new Elisp implementation. We envision a
significant role for Emacs within the GNU Project, becoming a central
part of a "Lisp machine for the 21st century".
# Discussion
## Questions and answers
- Q: About fibers: My understanding is that the problem with making Elisp concurrent is that none of the data structures (buffer, cons, vector, window etc) are concurrency-safe. How do fibers help with this?
- A: Fibers do not provide thread-safety for any of the existing
data structures. They are useful for building things that
don't use Emacs data structures, like a network client that
reads a "stream". Fibers can introduce new data structures
that are thread-safe, like "thread-local buffers".
- Q: <ramin\> You mentnioned that Emacs is roughly 25% written in C.
Do you have a rough idea of how much of Guile is written in C? Could
it be an improvement to make libguile a dependency of Emacs?
- A: The problem is not the quantity of C, but that there is C
involved at every single level/layer of computation in Emacs.
This makes it difficult to use concepts like delimited
continuations, that can make it easy to implement Emacs concepts
more simply.
- A: About guile: it's about 1/2 C.
- Q: A Common Lisp implementation for Guile sounds really cool! Is there already work on this underway?
- A: Yes, Robin is working on it, but focuses more on research on
how to do a polyglot lisp environnement where elisp and
common-lisp can work together (with lisp 1 vs lisp 2 issues with
different name spaces, package and module system interaction,
\...). If you are interested, the guile project will work on it.
- Q: As someone who's kinda new to the concept of Guile, is the
primary goal to transpile Emacs Lisp into Guile bytecode rather than
primarily focusing on adding support for writing code in Guile's
Scheme interface in particular?
- A: (not yet answered)
- Q: Did switching from guile 2 to 3 give any performance benefits?
- A: Not benchmarking stuff here yet, because guile emacs has too
much overhead involved in conforming to Emacs. Have not noticed
a perceptible change. Based on the Gabriel benchmark results,
it might have benefited a bit, but for Emacs we don't know
yet. Lowering the overhead is the best place to focus on to
optimize guile-emacs.
- Q: Do you know if the Emacs maintainers are interested in switching to Guile as the engine for Emacs Lisp?
- A: Previous maintainers were cautiously optimistic and
interested. Issues might be cross-platform compatibility.
- Q: Do you think guile-emacs will be able to use or (collaborate
with) some of the other awesome projects around Emacs-Lisp, like the
gypsum project presented earlier today, or Andrea Corallo's efforts
to make Emacs-Lisp more suitable for native compilation? Or even
something like the renewed PreScheme efforts?
- A: Gypsum has a different focus. Guile tries to improve lisp
instead of replacing lisp in any way. But some code can be
shared, especially if some parts of emacs are rewritten in lisp
- A: For libgccjit: it is accelerating the interpreter, which is
not great in the first place. So no direct relationship.
- A: For prescheme: it is a useful tool to look at, making it
easier to upstream one day.
- Q: SBCL, \...You mentioned Robert Strandh's SICL along with SBCL---does that work help with the implementation of CL in Guile?
- A: Time consuming part are the DSL from common lisp. So they can
be used. No plan on sharing code yet, as they are open-source.
- Q: Can you comment more on relation with hoot project and advantages
that might bring to guile-emacs?
- A: Hoot is only tested on scheme decompilation. But it is a
completely different project. One could image compile emacs to
wasm and maybe with a different garbage collector.
- Q: Thoughts on the gui situation for guile-emacs? A dom gui backend would be amazing
- A: (not yet answered)
- Q: is the "initial rebase work repo" the latest/preferred archive? i sent two patches to guile-emacs-devel to get emacs to link, but cannot get it to dump just yet: No applicable method: function-documentation
## Notes and feedback
- [https://guile-emacs.org/](https://guile-emacs.org/)
- Some more motivation: avoid FFI to increase performance and allow
for more optimizations (including type annotations)
- Love to hear reduction of reliance on C highlighted as a project goal, it's something I've brought up as a "third perspective" vs performance and language ergonomics in this weeks discussions
- my other go-to discussion contrib is "is anyone watching what Larry Valkama is doing?"
- is guile the core of gnu guix too ?
- yep!
- well, there's a bit of C++, bits of shell and make, yk -- more complex under the hood >u<
- but it's the core in spirit
- this is really interesting because this means gnu guix can use guile emacs and have better performance / features ? like define the system and emacs too with guile right? (I never used gnu guix but this talk makes me one to install it right now :P)
- I'm not sure there are really any implications for GUIX here, besides more eyeballs on Guile
- robin: there may be a guix connection in that object-capability-based secure IPC may enable guile-emacs to have fairly deep integration with other guile programs like guix and shepherd
- Ahhhh~ I love to see tail-call optimization 😊
- Is the goal to keep rebasing forever? Seems like a lot of work without little benefit
- Ah here's the slide addressing that...
- Woohooo wasm via hoot!
- i've def heard from a lot of guix users who are primarily interested in using one language everywhere, just on the edge of the performance and lang-interop disscusions
- why would you want to use emacs in a web browser?
- maybe because you can use emacs shortcuts on it ?
- wasm != web browser
- there's wasi
- exactly, Larry mentions emacs on wasm in his readme too, but i try not to use the web as my example when talking about porting away from C bc i find alternatives more compelling
- though tbf, *i* would love to be able to hit a shortcut from org-roam-ui and have it open emacs in-browser like vscode on github
- Not convinced that browsers equipped with WASM and WASM-GC are actually more portable than Emacs today
- it sucks that browser shortcuts conflict with Emacs keybindings
- That's due to the browser, not the underlying engine tho
- Ahhh you thought the CL bit would piss us off! Joke's on you, love CL ;)
- not as much as you might expect! boot-9.scm is a great place to look to see the world being built up in parens
- robin: thanks for watching my guile-emacs talk everyone! just one update, the -announce list may not be working properly yet, so please subscribe to guile-emacs-discuss if you want to stay informed about future guile-emacs work
- (the hcoop.net admins should be back to fix that in a few hours)
- robin: and thank you corwin for convincing me to do an emacsconf talk in the first place :)
- Thanks so much, robin and corwin!
Feedback:
- 👏👏👏👏
- Great! Thank you
- Utterly fantastic. This is so, so exciting!
[13:41:59] * gs-101 claps
- 👏👏👏
- 👏👏👏
- 👏👏👏
- 👏👏👏
- 👏👏👏👏
- Thank you Robin!
- 👏👏👏👏
- *applause* the dead are rising!
- This bring back memories of Smalltalk implementations being written in Smalltalk after initially being written in C.
- I utterly love Common Lisp 😊
- cl-lib is already a fifth of quality elisp (/s?)
- heh I feel this pain trying to get Wayland, CLIM, and OpenGL working
- in CL
- 👏 👏
- O_O
- I really liked robins talk
- great work, great talk -- thank for your work O)
- short and sweet, thank you
- +1
- <3
- lounge-204, there may be a guix connection in that object-capability-based secure IPC may enable guile-emacs to have fairly deep integration with other guile programs like guix and shepherd
- robin: speaking of security, guile-emacs will have a very straightforward answer to problems like https://eshelyaron.com/posts/2024-11-27-emacs-aritrary-code-execution-and-how-to-avoid-it.html -- the application of the slogan "if you don't have it, you can't use it". ordinary elisp coding style doesn't necessarily allow for automatic detection of that kind of threat, but in that specific case we would use our CL dialect's reflection mechanisms to provide an environment in which the macroexpander, at least when used for code completion and similar, simply would not have the ability to produce side effects in the global environment
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