Update: As of 2021-04-25 GCC/Native-Comp has been merged into master. I’m sure package managers will be updated soon.
What is Emacs Native-Comp?
Emacs Native-Comp refers a to the feature/native-comp branch of Emacs. It adds support for compiling
EmacsLisp to native code using libgccjit. This provides a notable performance improvement right out
of the box. See here for more details.
Installing using Nix on WSL2
Note: All instructions below are sourced from this gist. I’m sure the gist will be updated with changes more frequently than this blog post.
To install it on WSL2, first you’ll need to add the Emacs Community Overlay.
mkdir -p $HOME/.config/nixpkgs/overlays
echo "import (builtins.fetchTarball {
url = https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay/archive/master.tar.gz;
})" >> $HOME/.config/nixpkgs/overlays/emacs.nix
To avoid compiling from source, you’ll need to configure Cachix support. This is essentially a “cache” of the pre-built binaries.
nix-env -iA cachix -f https://cachix.org/api/v1/install
cachix use nix-community
Next, install Emacs.
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.emacsGcc
Checking if Native-Comp is working
To check if native compilation is available, fire up Emacs and evaluate the following elisp.
(if (and (fboundp 'native-comp-available-p)
(native-comp-available-p))
(message "Native compilation is available")
(message "Native complation is *not* available"))
If you see “Native compilation is available”, you’re golden!
Double checking if deferred compilation is set
This tells the native-comp system to generate natively compiled files every time Emacs loads a new .elc
file.
As of this post, this should be enabled by default. However, to make sure, check that comp-deferred-compilation is set to true.
A faster Emacs
A faster Emacs means we are one step closer to that ultimate developer environment paradise. Enjoy your speedy Emacs!