Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> skribis:
>
>> Guile's i18n is today where Emacs was at v20.1, with the (important)
>> difference that its internal representation is based on Unicode and
>> UTF-8.
>
> This is incorrect.
>
>> The lessons of Emacs development since then till today are yet to be
>> learned and incorporated into Guile.
>
> Probably many of them, but maybe not all.  After all, Guile is not a
> text editor, so the requirements may be different.

I quote from the GUILE project page:

    What is Guile? What can it do for you?

    Guile is the GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions, the
    official extension language for the GNU operating system.

    Guile is a library designed to help programmers create flexible
    applications. Using Guile in an application allows the application's
    functionality to be extended by users or other programmers with
    plug-ins, modules, or scripts. Guile provides what might be
    described as "practical software freedom," making it possible for
    users to customize an application to meet their needs without
    digging into the application's internals.

I don't see a qualifier "unless you were planning to write a text
editor".  GUILE even has "Extensions" in its name.  As well as
"Ubiquitous".  So how do you reckon that it should not be used for
extending text editors?  And how do you plead at the same time that it
should be used for extending Emacs?

It's not just for the sake of GuileEmacs that GUILE needs to work on the
cost of passing even mere UTF-8 into GUILE and back out.  GUILE cannot
even pass its own strings through its own string ports without
converting back and forth.

-- 
David Kastrup