Re: Is intellisense features integration in Emacs technically possible?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Tom <adatgyujto@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 18:59:10 +0000 (UTC)
> 
> Creating mature and extensive intellisense features is hard work,
> it requires lots of man hours and while it's technically possible to
> implement it in emacs it is unlikely to happen, because emacs lacks
> the developing resources.

According to this logic something like the rewrite of the display
engine that happened between Emacs 20 and Emacs 21, or bidirectional
editing support for Emacs 24 would never have happened.  But it did.
Each one of these took many man-months of work.

Look at the amount of changes that get committed every day to the
Emacs repository, and try to estimate the effort that goes into that.
Sometimes I wish I had such resources at my disposal on my daytime
job.

I think the shortage is not in development resources, but in motivated
individuals who'd sit down and do the job, and lobby others to come on
board and help.  Volunteers are welcome.

> A better way is to build on the hard work of other and interface
> emacs with an external tool.

Personally, I think implementing such features via external programs
is a terrible design.  It will never be smooth and responsive enough,
and on top of that you'd need to track development of those other
tools.  And what if they become abandoned some day?