Re: Development Speed

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Regarding paying technical debt, we could do a lot more of it, indeed,
but it takes time and effort and is hard to do without introducing
backward incompatible changes.

More importantly, we can't force people to do it.

This said, I think a lot of the work Emacs maintainers do (as opposed
to developers of 3rd party packages) is indeed just that.  It's just
that some of our debt are "too hard to tackle", so we focus on the
smaller things instead :-(

>> and why should we use C17?  What advantages does it hold?
> This is a legitimate question we can assess.

We have slowly moved from K&R C to ANSI C to newer versions of the
standard over the years, tho by and large we don't really pay attention
to particular versions of the standard but rather to specific features,
since the main issue is whether it's supported without too many bugs in
the various C compilers that we can expect people to use to build Emacs.

> Features like restricted pointers could improve performance?

My guess is that you're going to have a hell of a time coming up with
a contorted enough benchmark for such an improvement to be reliably
measurable in Emacs's code.

If it can lead to cleaner code and/or better errors&warnings, I'm all
for it, but I don't expect performance improvements to come from
the compiler.

> But I think the better question is what is the excuse for striving not
> to keep up with the latest language standard? (Assuming someone wants
> to work on it.)

I suggest you choose your words more carefully: "excuse" above implies
you think we lie, which doesn't seem like a good starting point for an
honest and constructive conversation.


        Stefan