Re: Contributing to Emacs

["João Paulo Labegalini de Carvalho" <jaopaulolc@gmail.com>]

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> That file is a bit misleading. Adding a byte-code is easy; modifying the
> compiler is more work, and so is deciding what byte-codes to add and what
> they should look like.
>
> I'd even go as far as saying that etc/TODO isn't necessarily a catalog of
> where new contributors should best direct their efforts.
>

That was what I suspected. I noticed that some items in the etc/TODO file
seem to have already been (partially) resolved (e.g. Convert modes that use
view-mode to be derived from special-mode instead).

I can see that adding a byte-code is the easy part. Modifying the compiler
is definitely a more challenging part, specially to decide when the new
byte-code should be generated.

Why don't you think of something that you personally would like Emacs to do
> that it currently does not, or doesn't do well enough? Or fix something
> that annoys you daily in your work? Such issues are never in short supply,
> and your time addressing them would be well-spent.
>

That is a very good suggestion. Currently I don't have anything that annoys
me,  the annoyances I had so far were easy to fix with existing features
and were due to my lack of Emacs knowledge.

The reason I turned to the new byte-code item was to exploit it as a way to
learn more about the inner workings of Emacs.  I guess that I did already
learn something with my modest investigation.

I will keep your suggestion in mind, and if I ever find something that
could be improved/done differently I will reach back out.

-- 
João Paulo L. de Carvalho
Ph.D Computer Science |  IC-UNICAMP | Campinas , SP - Brazil
Postdoctoral Research Fellow | University of Alberta | Edmonton, AB - Canada
joao.carvalho@ic.unicamp.br
joao.carvalho@ualberta.ca

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