EmacsLispLimitations

EmacsLisp is a surprisingly powerful, rich dialect of Lisp. It can be used to do many things, making it practically a general use application language, and not just a language for extending Emacs.

However, you will run into certain immovable walls the further you go:

There is (currently) no facility for using functions from dynamic libraries at run time in GnuEmacs. You are stuck with whatever native functions were built into your Emacs. Everything else is Lisp, or byte-compiled Lisp.

There is a patch for Emacs, however. See DynamicallyExtendingEmacs. XEmacs supports dynamic linking [1], so this is not really an EmacsLisp issue.

Update: There’s a draft for threads in Emacs Lisp [2]

See also WhyDoesElispSuck


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