Re: Rewriting make-docfile.c in Lisp?

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Spencer.

On Wed, May 05, 2021 at 12:49:12 -0400, Spencer Baugh wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> >> Couldn't this be written in Lisp?
> >
> > make-docfile does several jobs; did you mean to convert them all to
> > Lisp?  One of them is globals.h, which is needed for compiling the
> > Emacs C sources.

> Ah, I didn't see that globals.h was generated by make-docfile. I just
> meant generating etc/DOC. Pluss any other jobs done by make-docfile that
> aren't required to compile Emacs, if there are any.

Why would one want to write it in Lisp anyway?

We have a working program in C which requires little maintenance, yet
which is used continually.  Rewriting it in Lisp would be _work_.

Also, the Lisp version would run more slowly than the C version, leading
to more irritation over build speeds than there currently is.  I think
this is also part of the build which holds things up in a single core,
thus making its speed more important than, say, a C or Lisp compilation.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).