Someone in the thread mentions a plan that seemed inevitable at that time to convert GNU emacs to the guile flavor of scheme. Obviously that never happened. Does anybody know the story?
RMS has been deathly afraid of losing total control over developer tools -- GCC's whole architecture was purposely designed to frustrate anyone trying to write out-of-tree code that handles/produces any of its internal representations (which is why companies are pouring money into llvm/clang). Imagine the bricks he would shit if emacs was a useful target for external compilers!