Re: Release plans

["Richard M. Stallman" <rms@gnu.org>]

    The string representation is based on splay trees: a string
    is a splay tree of gap buffers.   There are various invariants
    (that I won't get into here) that make these trees more than
    ordinary splay trees -- they are a new data structure (afaict).

It will not be easy to determine whether this is a better data
structure for Emacs, even given a full implementation of it.  Even if
we had Emacs working using this, it might be hard to tell whether that
was an improvement.  For instance, many operations might be faster in
some cases, and slower in other cases.
is an improvement.

I also worry that it will be harder for most developers to understand
and change -- or even to use.  For instance, making redisplay operate
on that data structure could be very hard for that reason.

I don't think we would want to implement undo by making a snapshot,
even if the data makes snapshots possible, because this would take up
a lot more space than the current undo data.  Snapshots might be useful
for something, but not for this.