Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Óscar Fuentes]

Oleh Krehel <address@hidden> writes:

> I think slowly moving the Emacs C core to C++ is a good idea.  The two
> languages are supposed to be largely compile-compatible, i.e. g++ can
> understand what was meant for gcc.

Many times, while looking at the Emacs C sources, I thought "this would
be much simpler to understand and modify with C++." Furthermore, I would
volunteer to work on it.

However, there are two factors against it:

 * If the rewrite happens, using a better language than C++ is
   desirable. C++ is better than C, but it sucks too. Developing our own
   subset of Elisp that can be compiled to native code and can
   inter-operate with C looks more attractive.

 * Current maintainers are not likely to welcome the idea, for several
   legitimate reasons ("don't know C++", "I dislike it", etc). And
   Stallman would forbide it alright ("C++ in my Emacs? No way!" :-)
   Making the pill easier to swallow by restricting ourselves to the
   simpler C++ features greatly diminishes its effectiveness too.

See the case of GCC. It was too obvious that switching to C++ would
improve the code, but it was resisted for many years.

[snip]