Re: Shrinking the C core

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

>> IMNSHO, discussing a rewrite of Emacs in _any_ language is waste of
>> time and energy.  We've seen this many times (because people still
>> insist on bringing this up from time to time).  From where I stand,
>> the main reason is not even the fact that we decided not to do that,
>> but the fact that such a rewrite will never happen in practice.  Such
>> a rewrite is a massive job which requires very good knowledge of Emacs
>> internals and features, and a lot of time.  People who come close to
>> the required knowledge level are not interested in doing this job
>> (because they understand the futility), and those who think it should
>> be done simply don't know enough and/or don't have enough time on
>> their hands to pull it through.
>>
>> If Emacs will ever be "rewritten", it will not be Emacs, but a
>> text-processing system with a very different architecture and design,
>> which will take from the Emacs experience the lessons we learned and
>> implement them differently, to produce a system whose starting point
>> is closer to the needs of today's users and whose main technologies
>> are more modern from the get-go.
>
>I couldn't agree more.
>
>To me, a rewrite is quatsch, while adding CL facilities to Emacs makes a
>lot of sense.

I use to say often: either CL will come to Emacs or Emacs to CL, whichever
way around. We need some of features available on CL platforms, sbcl
notably: built-in concurrency and better garbage collectors from the get-go; and
some of the CL language features, namespaces notably, would be very nice to
have. I am not sure which one is easier to achieve, porting elisp to cl, or
rewriting core to have all those features. CFFI would also be nice to have so
that users can extend Emacs themselves with other libraries and not have to wait
for the core devs to do it for them. That would also lessen the burden on
maintaining that stuff in the core.