Re: Why bring new features to Emacs and not Emacs to new applications?

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Pascal J. Bourguignon
<pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
>
> For example, if an application is written in C++ (often the case
> nowadays), and use templates (also often the case if they use C++), then
> you already have a major stumbling block, in interfacing Lisp with C++
> thru a FFI:  Lisp has a dynamic nature where the objects are created at
> run-time, while C++ templates are instanciated at compilation time.  If

I do not unserstand much on this level, but is not OLE etc designed to
address these difficulties. (But see below.)

> - lisp hostile data structures,
>
>   Lisp use a garbage collector and typed objects, while other
>   programming languages often use instead manual memory management and
>   typed variables.  Keeping both structures consistent in parallel would
>   be a lot work.

I guess that is a work that must be done if plugin (or similar
interfaces) should be created. But the main problem is perhaps doing
that efficiently. And in the background, of course.

> - incompatible control structure.
>
>   While most applications will have like emacs a main event loop, it is
>   not designed usually to go thru (dynamically modifiable) keymaps to
>   handle in a uniform way the events, but would rather rely on
>   frameworks, which may implement their own modal control loops.

Isn't this an area where Emacs must change?