Emacs ffi

Emacs ffi

[laynor]

I've seen SXEmacs has a foreign function interface, any chance it will
also be in mainstream FSF Emacs?

Re: Emacs ffi

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

"laynor@gmail.com" <laynor@gmail.com> writes:

> I've seen SXEmacs has a foreign function interface, any chance it will
> also be in mainstream FSF Emacs?

Yes. 

P(FFI in FSF Emacs) = P(somebody ports FFI to FSF Emacs) * P(FFI patch is accepted by FSF Emacs maintainers).

Since you seems interested, and only a programmer would be interested
in FFI, we could evaluate P(somebody ports FFI to FSF Emacs)  to be
about 0.7 (you'll tell us).


On the other hand, AFAIK, FSF (ie. RMS) is not to keen to integrate
FFI to Emacs, so I would evaluate: P(FFI patch is accepted by FSF
Emacs maintainers) = 0.1 in the near future.

Total: P(FFI in FSF Emacs) = 0.7 * 0.1 = 0.07

Which is not null.

Moreover, you might not care about RMS's opinion, and be happy with
your port of FFI to GNU emacs.  There will probably be other users
happy with your patch too, and some interesting stuff will be
developed with it.  Which should increase P(FFI patch is accepted by
FSF Emacs maintainers) eventually.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__

Re: Emacs ffi

[Anselm Helbig]

At Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:28:49 -0700 (PDT),
"laynor@gmail.com" <laynor@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I've seen SXEmacs has a foreign function interface, any chance it will
> also be in mainstream FSF Emacs?

RMS doesn't like it because it would allow to link emacs with non-free
binary code. This leads to many possible licensing problems with
regard to the GPL that RMS wants to avoid. We already have a similar
situation with the Linux kernel. Search the emacs-devel archives for
some discussions about this, e.g.

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2003-07/msg00398.html

The pragmatic me would also very much like to see a FFI in GNU Emacs,
but it's also a political issue, unfortunately.

HTH, 

Anselm


-- 
Anselm Helbig 
mailto:anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com

Re: Emacs ffi

[Maurizio Vitale]

>>>>> "Anselm" == Anselm Helbig <anselm.helbig+news2009@googlemail.com> writes:

    Anselm> RMS doesn't like it because it would allow to link emacs
    Anselm> with non-free binary code. This leads to many possible
    Anselm> licensing problems with regard to the GPL that RMS wants to
    Anselm> avoid. We already have a similar situation with the Linux
    Anselm> kernel. Search the emacs-devel archives for some discussions
    Anselm> about this, e.g.

It is worth nothing that the same reasoning applies to GCC plugins,
which have now been accepted into the main thunk with license changes so
that one cannot develop proprietary plugins.

So maybe the same will happen with Emacs as well.

Best regards,

     Maurizio

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