Andy Wingo’s post from a decade ago, on the emacs-devel mailing list.
Emacs and Guile have a long and lovely history, longer in fact than Guile’s existence itself. Hacking Emacs is the core of GNU – as you know, Emacs is alive, it’s fungible, it’s free. The GNU system grew out of Emacs and the hack-experience that it represents.
But when it was decided that GNU should be like a Unix, it was a fall from grace, in a sense. The system no longer had the Emacs nature. Time passed, and people looked to see how to spread the Emacs nature from Emacs itself to the rest of the programs in the GNU system.
** Guile can implement Emacs Lisp better than Emacs can.**
No one will notice! Except that after a switch, Emacs would be faster, more powerful, and have the ability to access all of Guile’s facilities – the Scheme language, other languages implemented for Guile (Javascript, Lua, …), a proper ffi, dynamically loadable libraries, a module system, the numeric tower (rationals, bignums, etc), Guile’s existing libraries, delimited continuations (!), fast bytevector access, native threads, etc.
