Re: Efforts to attract more users?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:25:05 -0400
> From: John Yates <john@yates-sheets.org>
> Cc: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>, fplemma@gmail.com, rms@gnu.org, lennart.borgman@gmail.com, 
> 	joakim@verona.se, emacs-devel@gnu.org, miles@gnu.org
> 
> On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> >
> >> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> >>
> >> In that case, couldn't we just convert our base code to C++, then we
> >> could use wxWidgets.
> >
> > Maybe Lennart will volunteer for that job.
> 
> Bjarne Stroustrup pretty much beat Lennart to it.  It is mostly a
> project decision to invoke the C++ rather than the C compiler.

Compiling ANSI C sources with a C++ compiler is a relatively trivial
job.  Most of the work is elsewhere: you need to actually use C++
features in order to compile and link against wxWidgets, see their
documentation for details.  And that would involve solving all kinds
of potential incompatibilities, like the complex games we play with
memory allocation, including, but not limited to, relocating buffers
and strings behind the app's back, allocating off the pure space, etc.
I don't think a C++ Emacs will fly without a private implementation of
`new' and friends, for example.

And then we will need to figure out the possible incompatibilities
with other toolkits, whose sources we don't own and don't control.

So please don't try to pretend this as an easy decision and easy job.
It's not.  It's not impossible, of course; it just takes motivated
individuals and enough time.  If you are stepping forward, by all
means, describe your plan and let's discuss it.

> The gcc project recently took the plunge:

I wish Emacs was as simple a project as GCC and had so many developers
per area of expertise.