GNU Emacs Internals

This chapter describes how the runnable Emacs executable is dumped with the preloaded Lisp libraries in it, how storage is allocated, and some internal aspects of GNU Emacs that may be of interest to C programmers.

• Building Emacs		How the dumped Emacs is made.
• Pure Storage		Kludge to make preloaded Lisp functions shareable.
• Garbage Collection		Reclaiming space for Lisp objects no longer used.
• Stack-allocated Objects		Temporary conses and strings on C stack.
• Memory Usage		Info about total size of Lisp objects made so far.
• C Dialect		What C variant Emacs is written in.
• Writing Emacs Primitives		Writing C code for Emacs.
• Writing Dynamic Modules		Writing loadable modules for Emacs.
• Object Internals		Data formats of buffers, windows, processes.
• C Integer Types		How C integer types are used inside Emacs.