Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 22:51:26 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> skribis:
> 
> > In any case, Emacs can never be satisfied with the current Guile
> > infrastructure for i18n.  There are too many shortcomings, some of
> > them were mentioned here.  Yes, Guile can be fixed to be better in
> > that area, but no one is working on that, AFAIK, and what's more
> > important, lead Guile developers don't even agree Guile should move in
> > that direction.  (This especially puzzles me: to have a good example
> > before you and not follow it?  Emacs learned what it has now the hard
> > way, have paid in blood, sweat and tears for that knowledge, and still
> > Guile developers think they "know better"?  Present parties excluded,
> > of course.)
> 
> My point is: Emacs can keep doing its own thing in that area.

Of course.  But that takes away a serious chunk of arguments in favor
of Guile-based Emacs, for 2 reasons: (a) there will have to be a
non-trivial translation layer between the two, and (b) a very large
part of Emacs's C core will have to be left intact, instead of
removing it because Guile already does that.

> (And I would guess that neither C++, nor Lua, nor anything else would
> provide an i18n infrastructure that would satisfy Emacs out-of-the-box.)

Of course.  But the Guile alternative is being brought up as being
much better than those others.  If we leave the strings and i18n
alone, a large part of that argument goes away.