arguably gnu emacs is almost like multics emacs in this sense; the editing functionality of gnu emacs without any lisp code loaded is not actually zero but is pretty minimal. and i was surprised to find the other day that gnu emacs on my laptop is now compiling all my elisp to machine code, which is another similarity to maclisp, albeit a very recent one
more generally, though, even if you aren't using a gui library with a built-in text editor widget, gigahertz and gigaflops make it not especially challenging to write a usable text editor in a high-level language. http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/edumb.py is 183 lines of fairly straightforward python and includes full-text search and infinite undo; it's not quite usable but pretty close. its really stupid buffer data structure might start to get unresponsive once you're editing a file in the neighborhood of 100k