[Ecls-list] Configuration patch

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 8:12 PM, Didier Verna <didier at lrde.epita.fr> wrote:

> Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll <juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> > It depends :-) I got as far as being able to link ECL into Emacs long
> > long time ago.
>
>   No kidding!?
>

No, it is serious, but it did not go very far. You have to understand this
was at the beginning of ECL, around the San Francisco ALU meeting, when ECL
was still very immature and embedding was not as easy.


> > This involved quite some heavy hacking of the program, to remove its
> > garbage collector and replace it with the Boehm-Weiser one
>
>   You mean Emacs's gc right?
>

Yes. I realized it from the very beginning: if I wanted ECL to manipulate
Emacs structures I could not allow Emacs to collect memory at will.
Replacing the garbage collector was not easy, but not too hard. I had to
work with bare Emacs (not Xemacs), which at the time had a much smaller code
base, removing all memory allocation routines and using the Boehm Weiser
ones. The result was ok. I had a working Emacs, which was slow because I had
not tweaked the use of the garbage collector (no distinction between
pointer-full and pointer-less memory, no customized GC procedures,...) and
because I was not very good at bootstrapping it :-)


>  Yes. Then, I think step 2 would be to implement Emacs Lisp on top of
> ECL in order to preserve compatibility with existing stuff. Then we
> could gradually move the core and other libs to a true CL
> implementation.
>
> But first it would be interesting to see whether there are good elisp
> > compilers that work with ECL.
>
>   What do you mean?
>

What I mean is that if one is eventually to replace Elisp with Common Lisp
it would be worth having a look at the existing Elisp->Common Lisp
converters. I believe there used to be one, but I do not know whether it
still works, or whether it could support ECL.

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com
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