On: Second Climacs – Emacs Implementation in Common Li...

[gmfawcett]

> it wasn't AOT compiled to the metal, which Common Lisp is.

It's required that a CL implementation supports compilation, but compiling to machine code isn't required. e.g., Clisp has a bytecode compiler.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp#Compiler_and_inter...

- https://clisp.sourceforge.io/impnotes.html#bytecode

[lispm → gmfawcett]

Though they experimented with a native code JIT...