Re: [External] : Re: Shrinking the C core

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

[Redirected to emacs-tangents]

> From: Gerd Möllmann <gerd.moellmann@gmail.com>
> Cc: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>,  Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>,
>  arthur.miller@live.com,  acm@muc.de,  luangruo@yahoo.com,
>  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2023 06:38:00 +0200
> 
> "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> writes:
> 
>  > But it could be done. There is a technical path forward to it.
> 
> Which would have to cope with buffer-local bindings.

Right.  And the display code.  And text en/decoding.  And input queue.
And faces.  Etc. etc. -- these are all written in C, but are full of
Lisp data structures and calls into Lisp, so separating them is
anything but easy or even straightforward.

People who have enough talents, knowledge, and energy to do this kind
of job will be better off, and will serve the community better, if
they design an Emacs differently, taking into consideration the main
lessons we've learned.  That "neo-Emacs" could have a mode whereby it
worked in a way compatible with the current Emacs, so that people who
must run the old applications could run them without changes.  But it
should be based on different, more modern architectural decisions.
Handling of buffer text, GC, the display engine, threads -- all these
and more needs to be rethought and preferably replaced with more
modern solutions, to avoid bumping into the same limitations right
from the get-go.