Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 23:26:48 -0500
> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: deng@randomsample.de, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Give up on the idea of generating and using data that is less than the
> full AST.
> 
>   > David wants to write a GCC plugin that outputs the complete AST.
> 
> We do not want to promote that sort of plugin.

But if access to the AST is necessary for providing important
features, such as intelligent completion and refactoring in OO
languages, then you are saying that Emacs users can never have those
important features, unless they go out and use non-free or less-free
or GNU-unfriendly software instead of GCC.

Without these feature, Emacs is much less powerful an editor and a
programming environment than it could have been.  And the GCC plugin
architecture already requires GPL compliance, so having such a plugin
should not in itself pose any danger to Free Software and the GNU
project.

Please help us understand why we as a community should pay such a high
price where seemingly there's no real problem.