Re: emacs-devel/debbugs communication (was: New Package for NonGNU-ELPA: clojure-ts-mode)

[Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>]

Richard Stallman wrote:

>> 1. Maintainers often say "no" to certain things (like code
>>    refactoring that does not lead to any clear improvement)
>>    because they know from their extensive experience that
>>    some ideas are "non-starters". However, they do not
>>    elaborate much why one or another thing is
>>    not acceptable.
>>
>>    Not elaborating is actually perfectly understandable -
>>    it would be annoying to repeat the same thing many times
>>    and would also waste the maintainer's valuable time that
>>    could be spent for something more productive.
>
> I think I can understand why this feels painful -- but what
> concretely could we ask the maintainers to do which would be
> better overall?

gnu.emacs.devel FAQ!

I. BAD IDEAS AND WHY THEY ARE BAD

1. Idea: Drop Elisp, instead use SBCL for Emacs

Argument:

  SBCL is faster and has parallelism for modern multicores.
  We would be able to use everything the SBCL community has
  developed. For the supposed Lisp editor, we would have the
  most relentless and cruel Lisp on Earth, instead of the
  half-goofy Elisp which some people think is just used to set
  a bunch of options.

Why it is STILL a bad idea:

  Elisp is now also very fast with native-compilation and it
  is likely it will get even faster as that technology is
  quite new, and is being actively developed. Elisp is also
  much more portable than SBCL. The SBCL speed advantage and
  parallelism relies on specific constructs the programmer has
  to add explicitly in the code. So all our Joe Hacker's Elisp
  wouldn't benefit from that in its current state. Not to
  mention all our Joe Hacker's Elisp would have to be
  re-written and adopted into SBCL. To re-write Emacs so that
  its Lisp would be SBCL and not Elisp would be an insanely
  big undertaking with a very unclear image what the result
  would be. Remember, one shouldn't burn down the house to
  kill the rats. Also, there are Emacs-like editors already
  that are based on CL. So we are not doing it, goddammit!

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal