guile/lang/elisp/STATUS

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I've now finished my currently planned work on the Emacs Lisp
translator in guile-core CVS.

It works well enough for experimentation and playing around with --
see the README file for details of what it _can_ do -- but has two
serious restrictions:

- Most Emacs Lisp primitives are not yet implemented.  In particular,
  there are no buffer-related primitives.

- Performance compares badly with Emacs.  Using a handful of
  completely unscientific tests, I found that Guile was between 2 and
  20 times slower than Emacs.  (See the comment in
  lang/elisp/example.el for details of tests and results.)

Interestingly, both these restrictions point in the same direction:
the way forward is to define the primitives by compiling a
preprocessed version of the Emacs source code, not by trying to
implement them in Scheme.  (Which, of course, is what Ken Raeburn's
project is already trying to do.)

Given this conclusion, I expect that most of the translator's Scheme
code will eventually become obsolete, replaced by bits of Emacs C
code.  Until then, though, it should have a role:

- as a guide to the Guile Emacs project on how to interface to the
  Elisp support in libguile (notably, usage of `@fop' and `@bind')

- as a proof of concept and fun thing to experiment with

- as a working translator that could help us develop our picture of
  how we want to integrate translator usage in general with the rest
  of Guile.