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Computer Science > Programming Languages

arXiv:2004.02504 (cs)
[Submitted on 6 Apr 2020]

Title:Bringing GNU Emacs to Native Code

Authors:Andrea Corallo, Luca Nassi, Nicola Manca
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    Abstract: Emacs Lisp (Elisp) is the Lisp dialect used by the
    Emacs text editor family. GNU Emacs can currently execute Elisp
    code either interpreted or byte-interpreted after it has been
    compiled to byte-code. In this work we discuss the implementation
    of an optimizing compiler approach for Elisp targeting native
    code. The native compiler employs the byte-compiler's internal
    representation as input and exploits libgccjit to achieve code
    generation using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)
    infrastructure. Generated executables are stored as binary files
    and can be loaded and unloaded dynamically. Most of the
    functionality of the compiler is written in Elisp itself,
    including several optimization passes, paired with a C back-end
    to interface with the GNU Emacs core and libgccjit. Though still
    a work in progress, our implementation is able to bootstrap a
    functional Emacs and compile all lexically scoped Elisp files,
    including the whole GNU Emacs Lisp Package Archive (ELPA).
    Native-compiled Elisp shows an increase of performance ranging
    from 2.3x up to 42x with respect to the equivalent byte-code,
    measured over a set of small benchmarks.

Comments:    8 pages, 1 figure
Subjects:    Programming Languages (cs.PL)
ACM classes: D.3.4
DOI:         10.5281/zenodo.3736363
Cite as:     arXiv:2004.02504 [cs.PL]
             (or arXiv:2004.02504v1 [cs.PL] for this version)

Submission history

From: Nicola Manca Dr. [view email]
[v1] Mon, 6 Apr 2020 09:18:29 UTC (94 KB)
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