Re: clutter integration in the xwidget branch

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Julien Danjou <julien@danjou.info> writes:
> Why not embed WebKit as a display engine?

As chad said, it would likely be pretty difficult.  Emacs is not a
simple text editor with generic requirements for redisplay that can
easily be fulfilled by random toolkit text widgets.

Emacs redisplay implements many specialized features which are used by
lots of lisp code.  All that would either have to be emulated (how?)
or abandoned.  Moreover, the traditional web-browser method of display
-- calculating a DOM from the underlying document, and then letting
the engine display the DOM efficiently -- is not a particularly good
match with the traditional Emacs display architecture, which mostly
only incurs overhead for _displayed_ portions of the text.  A big
change in models like that would very likely to have some big
repercussions.[*]

The existing terminal display code of course can't support many
features of the graphical display, but it still shares much of the
same code, and respects the same basic constraints.

This has been suggested many times before in various forms, and I'm
not aware that there's ever been a very positive answer.

[*] Visit a 500MB document in Emacs? No prob, displays quickly!  Open
the same document in Google Chrome [a speed-focused browser which uses
webkit]?  System brought to knees, I had to kill it after my system
started thrashing itself to death.

-Miles

-- 
Is it true that nothing can be known?  If so how do we know this?  -Woody Allen