First, let’s install some build dependencies:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade  # update packages
sudo apt install build-essential libjansson4 libjansson-dev \
    libgnutls28-dev libtree-sitter-dev libsqlite3-dev
sudo apt install texinfo  # to generate documentation

build-essnetial should install necessary tools to build C/C++ programs such as gcc, g++, make, gdb and dpkg. The rest packages install pre-compiled libraries.

Besides these packages, there are two important packages to support Lisp native compilation:

sudo apt install ibgccjit0 libgccjit-11-dev  # 11 is my gcc version

After installing them, make sure to export the path in the current session, otherwise the compiler will not realize it.

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/11:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

The last thing to do is install a bunch of X and GTK-3 development libraries for Emacs GUI, and another bunch of image processing libraries.

sudo apt install libx11-dev libtiff-dev libgtk-3-dev libncurses-dev
sudo apt install libtiff5-dev libgif-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libxpm-dev

Without the above packages, one may encounter the following error when configuring the Emacs build:

You seem to be running X, but no X development libraries were found. You should install the relevant development files for X and for the toolkit you want, such as Gtk+ or Motif. Also make sure you have development files for image handling, i.e. tiff, gif, jpeg, png and xpm.

At this moment, we can start to download Emacs source code:

wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-29.4.tar.xz
tar xvf emacs-29.4.tar.xz
cd emacs-29.4

Then we can configure the build (i.e., generate Makefile) with the following command.

./configure --with-native-compilation --with-x-toolkit=gtk3 --without-pop

• --with-native-compilation: with this flag the Emacs source code is compiled to native machine code to achieve better performance.
  • Otherwise it is compiled to bytecode and then interpreted by Emacs virtual machine during runtime.
• --with-x-toolkit=gtk3: this is recommended by Claude.
• --without-pop: if we are not using Emacs as the email client, we don’t need to bother configure the protocol.

If everything goes well, one should see the following line in the output. If not, make sure libgccjit has been installed and exported.

Does Emacs have native lisp compiler? yes

Now we can finally start compiling the Emacs:

make -j$(nproc)

If some error occurs, we may want to start again, to do this:

sudo apt install autoconf automake
rm -f Makefile
./autogen.sh  # regenerate the configuration file
# then rebuild
make -j$(nproc)

Finally, install Emacs globally:

sudo make install

To confirm the Emacs indeed used the native Lisp compiler, one can evaluate inside the vanilla Emacs with M-: (M is Alt in WSL2):

(native-comp-available-p) ;; should return t

Congratulations! You have now installed the latest and fastest Emacs on WSL2.