Using Guile for Emacs

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2024-12-26 23:30:03

Emacs is, famously, an editor—perhaps far more—that is extensible using its own variant of the Lisp programming language, Emacs Lisp (or Elisp). This year's edition of EmacsConf, which is an annual "gathering" that has been held online for the past five years, had two separate talks on using a different variant of Lisp, Guile, for Emacs. Both projects would preserve Elisp compatibility, which is a must, but they would use Guile differently. The first talk we will cover was given by Robin Templeton, who described the relaunch of the Guile-Emacs project, which would replace the Elisp in Emacs with a compiler using Guile. A subsequent article will look at the other talk, which is about an Emacs clone written using Guile.

LWN looked at Guile-Emacs way back in 2014, when Templeton had completed the last of several Google Summer of Code (GSoC) internships working on it. Around that time, Templeton had a fully functional prototype, but they moved on to other things until recently reviving the project.

Guile is an implementation of Scheme, which is a language in the Lisp family, as is Elisp, they began; Guile is also the official extension language for the GNU project. The goal of the Guile-Emacs project is to use Guile to implement Elisp in Emacs. There are two main components to that: an Elisp compiler built on Guile and an Emacs that has its built-in Lisp implementation completely replaced with Guile.