Re: emacs-devel/debbugs communication (was: New Package for NonGNU-ELPA: clojure-ts-mode)

[Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com>]

i thought nobody serious about emacs suggests rewriting existing elisp
but rather rebasing it?

On 9/4/23, Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> wrote:
> Richard Stallman wrote:
>
>>> 1. Maintainers often say "no" to certain things (like code
>>>    refactoring that does not lead to any clear improvement)
>>>    because they know from their extensive experience that
>>>    some ideas are "non-starters". However, they do not
>>>    elaborate much why one or another thing is
>>>    not acceptable.
>>>
>>>    Not elaborating is actually perfectly understandable -
>>>    it would be annoying to repeat the same thing many times
>>>    and would also waste the maintainer's valuable time that
>>>    could be spent for something more productive.
>>
>> I think I can understand why this feels painful -- but what
>> concretely could we ask the maintainers to do which would be
>> better overall?
>
> gnu.emacs.devel FAQ!
>
> I. BAD IDEAS AND WHY THEY ARE BAD
>
> 1. Idea: Drop Elisp, instead use SBCL for Emacs
>
> Argument:
>
>   SBCL is faster and has parallelism for modern multicores.
>   We would be able to use everything the SBCL community has
>   developed. For the supposed Lisp editor, we would have the
>   most relentless and cruel Lisp on Earth, instead of the
>   half-goofy Elisp which some people think is just used to set
>   a bunch of options.
>
> Why it is STILL a bad idea:
>
>   Elisp is now also very fast with native-compilation and it
>   is likely it will get even faster as that technology is
>   quite new, and is being actively developed. Elisp is also
>   much more portable than SBCL. The SBCL speed advantage and
>   parallelism relies on specific constructs the programmer has
>   to add explicitly in the code. So all our Joe Hacker's Elisp
>   wouldn't benefit from that in its current state. Not to
>   mention all our Joe Hacker's Elisp would have to be
>   re-written and adopted into SBCL. To re-write Emacs so that
>   its Lisp would be SBCL and not Elisp would be an insanely
>   big undertaking with a very unclear image what the result
>   would be. Remember, one shouldn't burn down the house to
>   kill the rats. Also, there are Emacs-like editors already
>   that are based on CL. So we are not doing it, goddammit!
>
> --
> underground experts united
> https://dataswamp.org/~incal
>
>
>


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