Re: guile and emacs and elisp, oh my!

[David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>]

Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> writes:
> I think it is beneficial to a program like Emacs to have a single
> extension language.  A single language makes both reuse and debugging
> simpler.  Multiple languages equals chaos.

I tend to agree. The priority should be to make Emacs Lisp more
powerful, for example by adding stuff from the CL library to the
language core.

> My experience with Emacs as a user and occasional developer is that
> elisp is fast enough for most tasks you'd actually want to write in
> elisp.

With Emacs now integrating IDE features like CEDET, the demands on the
speed of Emacs Lisp are increasing. The Semantic analyzer really pushes
what currently can be done in Emacs Lisp in a reasonable time, and it
would obviously benefit from a faster implementation. I guess that it
will become inevitable to implement some of the database handling into a
native C library of some sorts, but the more can be done in Emacs Lisp,
the better.

> 2. Display model.  If you try to write, say, a decent presentation
>    program in Emacs (let alone something truly complex like a browser),
>    you quickly run into holes.

I agree. Some time ago, I tried to implement a graphical diff, similar
to Kompare (see
http://www.caffeinated.me.uk/kompare/screenshot.png). People might argue
that stuff like this is just eye candy, but in my opinion a graphical
presentation like this can be really useful to get a quick overview of
the changes. I used a terrible hack to dynamically generate bitmap
images in the middle of the two buffers, but it was just too slow and
'flickery'. I think it would be great if Emacs could support graphical
primitives like this.

-David