Re: Compilation to native

[Juri Linkov]

> Maybe Richard is right, but I wouldn't be surprised if we can't go much
> faster than that.  A lot of time is spent in C primitives including
> binding variables and looking them up.  Also a lot of the time spent in
> function call is cleverly spread and duplicated between the caller and the
> callee which are at two different places, so there's a lot of opportunities
> for optimization but it's very difficult to do it at all, let
> alone do it automatically.

Yes, this would require implementing an optimizing Lisp compiler
which is a tremendous task.

> And compiling CCL to native code is likely to bring much more impressive
> speed ups because less time is spent in C primitives.

Since CCL is a much simpler and quite independent language
implementing its compilation is more manageable task and it should
considerably improve the performance of code conversion which
currently is very poor.

One of the main questions that should be decided now is how to
implement CCL compilation: dynamically with the help of GNU Lightning,
or statically by generating C code which will be compiled by a C
compiler into the Emacs executable.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/