Re: Is Elisp really that slow?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>
> Date: Mon, 13 May 2019 17:00:01 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > Out of the important features listed in
> >
> >   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment
> >
> > we completely lack support for code
> > completion and refactoring. Our debugging
> > support is only up to speed with GDB, which
> > means we are limited in the programming
> > languages we can support reasonably well.
> 
> OK, so if I understand you correctly we are not
> happy to be just an editor that writes code and
> then relies on other program to the rest, like
> compiling and debugging, only we do actually
> want that, but we want it to be
> more integrated?

No, you misunderstood.  We want these features to be as programmers
expect nowadays.  Whether some of the features depend on other
programs or not is immaterial, but if they do, the respective Emacs
front-ends should provide what the users expect.

GDB is not an IDE, it's a debugging engine.  It's okay to make an IDE
whose debugging facilities use GDB as their engine, but the front end
needs to provide the functionalities expected from debugging function
in an IDE.  And if GDB doesn't support some popular language, like
Python, we need an alternative for those who want to develop Python
programs; we don't want to tell them to go to the shell and invoke pdb
as a console program.

> And we want more language-specific features
> like I guess Java has with Eclipse or C# with
> .NET/Mono?

They are not language-specific features, they are in general features
needed in any language.

> And we also disregard things like Dired, Gnus,
> ERC, Emacs-w3m, and what have you, which are
> a great help when developing... if you don't
> talk to much instead of working, that is :$
> 
> We also disregard that when you work on
> a project there are often several languages
> involved, documentation, a home page, and so on
> and we have all that all in one house with the
> same finger-habits, help system, and
> extension/configuration interface.

No, we don't disregard anything.  But having Dired or the other
niceties is little comfort if what you need is to refactor your code
or debug it.

> I think the whole (point) with Emacs is that it
> is ready for everything, with much the same
> approach. Want to learn a new language?
> You can start immediately, as you don't have to
> learn a new editor or "IDE" first!

What if I don't want to learn a language, but to program in it?
I want the tools programmers nowadays expect to have from an
environment that claims to be for programmers.