Re: Emacs users a dying breed?

[Philipp Haselwarter <philipp@haselwarter.org>]

On Sat, Jun 23 2012 14:05 (@1340453147), Teemu Likonen wrote:

> Philipp Haselwarter [2012-06-23 13:33:30 +0200] wrote:
>
>> I very much disagree, one of the things emacs is most frequently
>> accused of is bloat. Overhauling some of the defaults might be worth
>> discussing, but adding even more code to the core distribution seems
>> to be the wrong approach. IMO Emacs should focus on providing the core
>> - an editing engine and a lisp interpreter - and let the user decide
>> which plugins he wants to run.
>
> The Emacs distribution (.tar.gz) contains all bells and whistles but not
> everything is loaded into memory. What is loaded by default is pretty
> much only the Emacs Lisp interpreter and the editing core and autoload
> definitions for other features.

I don't know for a fact what is loaded by default, but the distribution
surely contains a lot of elisp programs that are not of interest for
most users.

> And Emacs is a very light-weight program by today's standards. I think
> it was bloated in the 80's.

On my 64bit linux system the emacs executable weights in at 13M, feel
free to comparing that to any other interpreter.

> From the point of view of code maintenance it might be good idea to have
> more code on a (semi-)official package repository. If I maintained an
> official Emacs package I'd prefer using my own version control system
> etc. and just upload releases to official package archive.

ELPA allows you to do just that. Maybe some of the packages distributed
with emacs would see some more attention and patches if they had their
own repos and communities instead of living in the emacs tree.

-- 
Philipp Haselwarter