Chad, this is an excellent reply.  Thanks,

-pmr

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 5:42 PM, chad <yandros@gmail.com> wrote:

> NativeClient is mostly about using the local processor to cut out server
> round-trips for computations.  Unfortunately for your idea, it doesn't
> address the idea of the display engine; native client nexe's are expected
> to use the browser's ui.  There is some experimental 3D support for nexe's
> via their alternative to NSAPI, but this is far enough away from Emacs that
> a port would be complex.  For your goals, I'd guess that xembed (ala the
> xembed branch) is an easier practical path to a prototype.
>
> This idea, like Tom Tromey's `rebase emacs on Common Lisp', Steve's `Emacs
> in JavaScript', and the various Guilemacs attempts point out (yet again)
> something I would not have guessed when I started with emacs ~22 years ago:
> while the most technically valuable piece of Emacs (aside from its freedom)
> is the extensive libraries of elisp code, the most critical piece is
> actually the display engine.  It's very hard to move Emacs anywhere that
> the display engine won't go, and it seems to be very hard to move the
> display engine.
>
> *Chad
>
> P.S. This makes the herculean efforts of things like epoch, multi-tty, and
> bidi all the more impressive.  Thanks again to all the wonderful emacs
> hackers out there.