From: "Gerd Möllmann" <gerd.moellmann@gmail.com>
To: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
Cc: emacs-tangents@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Shrinking the C core
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2023 08:33:43 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <m25y4eeg54.fsf@Pro.fritz.box> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <AM9PR09MB4977BC40B6145EC83F02738C96F0A@AM9PR09MB4977.eurprd09.prod.outlook.com> (Arthur Miller's message of "Wed, 13 Sep 2023 07:06:07 +0200")
Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>>> IMNSHO, discussing a rewrite of Emacs in _any_ language is waste of
>>> time and energy. We've seen this many times (because people still
>>> insist on bringing this up from time to time). From where I stand,
>>> the main reason is not even the fact that we decided not to do that,
>>> but the fact that such a rewrite will never happen in practice. Such
>>> a rewrite is a massive job which requires very good knowledge of Emacs
>>> internals and features, and a lot of time. People who come close to
>>> the required knowledge level are not interested in doing this job
>>> (because they understand the futility), and those who think it should
>>> be done simply don't know enough and/or don't have enough time on
>>> their hands to pull it through.
>>>
>>> If Emacs will ever be "rewritten", it will not be Emacs, but a
>>> text-processing system with a very different architecture and design,
>>> which will take from the Emacs experience the lessons we learned and
>>> implement them differently, to produce a system whose starting point
>>> is closer to the needs of today's users and whose main technologies
>>> are more modern from the get-go.
>>
>>I couldn't agree more.
>>
>>To me, a rewrite is quatsch, while adding CL facilities to Emacs makes a
>>lot of sense.
>
> I use to say often: either CL will come to Emacs or Emacs to CL, whichever
> way around. We need some of features available on CL platforms, sbcl
> notably: built-in concurrency and better garbage collectors from the get-go; and
> some of the CL language features, namespaces notably, would be very nice to
> have.
I agree. Alas, others, who haven't seem the light yet, don't :-).
> I am not sure which one is easier to achieve, porting elisp to cl, or
> rewriting core to have all those features.
I don't know either, of course. I guess it depends on the feature. Some
random thoughts:
I'm pretty sure that CL packages could be added to Emacs as it is, if
some people would work on it.
I'm also pretty sure that an incremental + generational GC could be
added, at least as an option, because I would have almost done it some
20+ years ago. It was torpedoed by a patent issue concerning
mostly-copying GC. The patent has since expired. A lot of work, of
course. I think some people do or have done something in this area, but
I don't know details.
I'm not at all sure that non-cooperative multi-threading could be added
to Emacs. But I'm also not sure how a CL core would help here.
On the other hand, I'm pretty convinced that an Emacs core written in CL
would have to be close to 100% compatible with the existing C core to be
accepted by users. That includes a CL rewrite of the C Elisp, including
byte code interpreter.
That's a massive endeavor. My hair stands up when I remember the
compatibility problems I faced with the new redisplay ages ago.
Multiply that by some factor > 1. But maybe that's a burnt child
dreading the fire :-).
I'm also not sure how a CL (not Elisp) program would look like using a
CL Emacs core. Is it nice enough, so to speak? Think of Emacs strings,
which couldn't be CL strings because of text properties, buffer-local
variables...
(Another ansatz might be to make Emacs C core a lib. I haven't given
that much thought, but it could be more promising than rewriting the
whole shit in CL :-).)
> CFFI would also be nice to have so
> that users can extend Emacs themselves with other libraries and not have to wait
> for the core devs to do it for them. That would also lessen the burden on
> maintaining that stuff in the core.
FFI for Emacs once existed, I think Dave Love wrote one, for instance.
Don't know what became of that. Might be an issue with interfacing to
non-free libs.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-09-13 6:33 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-09-13 5:06 Shrinking the C core Arthur Miller
2023-09-13 6:33 ` Gerd Möllmann [this message]
2023-09-14 11:35 ` Arthur Miller
2023-09-14 13:03 ` Gerd Möllmann
2023-09-14 13:20 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-09-15 17:11 ` Emanuel Berg
2023-09-15 18:39 ` Eli Zaretskii
[not found] <AM9PR09MB497796E739349F8CB9AD4F4996F1A@AM9PR09MB4977.eurprd09.prod.outlook.com>
2023-09-12 11:55 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-09-12 18:22 ` chad
2023-09-12 18:47 ` Yuri Khan
2023-09-12 19:06 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-09-12 19:07 ` joakim
2023-09-12 19:42 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-09-12 21:56 ` joakim
2023-09-13 5:05 ` Emanuel Berg
2023-09-13 14:29 ` joakim
2023-09-15 5:46 ` Emanuel Berg
2023-09-13 15:33 ` Fraga, Eric
2023-09-15 5:51 ` Emanuel Berg
2023-09-15 11:38 ` Fraga, Eric
[not found] <AM9PR09MB4977E9C0FD5922D0291C4B0796F1A@AM9PR09MB4977.eurprd09.prod.outlook.com>
2023-09-12 11:29 ` Po Lu
[not found] <AM9PR09MB4977C010362EBF83BCF3491C96E0A@AM9PR09MB4977.eurprd09.prod.outlook.com>
[not found] ` <873503y66i.fsf@yahoo.com>
[not found] ` <AM9PR09MB49779854134CDC2E4FB2AD2996E0A@AM9PR09MB4977.eurprd09.prod.outlook.com>
[not found] ` <E1qbX63-0003Ty-Rn@fencepost.gnu.org>
[not found] ` <E1qdgsR-0000j8-BN@fencepost.gnu.org>
[not found] ` <AM9PR09MB497757F8D921063E3D60D40C96EFA@AM9PR09MB4977.eurprd09.prod.outlook.com>
[not found] ` <ZPhih7q2ml8v6EfP@ACM>
[not found] ` <87bkeeoqf3.fsf@dataswamp.org>
[not found] ` <ZPl0+E1jYEJ2noRt@tuxteam.de>
[not found] ` <87wmx2mooq.fsf@dataswamp.org>
2023-09-07 7:52 ` tomas
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