Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> skribis:

> I don’t think it’s the end of the world, though.  Emacs could pretty
> much keep using its own text I/O routines if those of Guile don’t fit
> the bill.
>
>> Another minor point is that Guile still doesn't allow to control the
>> EOL format of text I/O independently of binary I/O mode, again
>> something that Emacs must (and does) have.
>
> Guile’s I/O ports could be extended to handle that, but again, even if
> they don’t, Emacs could do its own thing.
>
> I doubt there are major blockers.  Surely things will need to be tweaked
> here and there, but only hacking can tell.  :-)

Everything's easy once one decides somebody else is the right person to
be doing it.  At any rate, the way I see it, the previous work done on
GUILE-Emacs have been doing a lot with bringing GUILE's strong suits
into Emacs.  But the work won't be done without bringing Emacs' strong
suits into GUILE.  Emacs has decades of character handling internally
and externally under its belt and lots of experience gained the hard
way.  It will require quite a bit of dedicated work to bring GUILE up to
speed.  And since there aren't decades of time available for repeating
all the respective experience, it will have to take a large page out of
how Emacs does it.

-- 
David Kastrup