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Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language
From: |
Eli Zaretskii |
Subject: |
Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language |
Date: |
Sun, 11 Oct 2015 22:53:48 +0300 |
> From: Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 11 Oct 2015 21:43:08 +0200
>
> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > It's all a pipe dream, no more, unless someone steps forward who
> > really intends and is able to do the job. And that is even before we
> > start talking about which alternative language should that be,
> > something that in itself is not a trivial decision.
>
> I agree, but the key here is that others said "No, there is no need or
> advantage on doing so." Your response is of a very different kind.
Not really. I just stopped short of rationalizing why something that
is difficult is not really required ;-)
> However, it is not absolutely necessary to have a global understanding
> of the module that it is being translated to the new language. Depending
> on the target language, a shallow knowledge can be sufficient.
Only where the current code is self-contained, i.e. does not make any
serious use of system APIs and is not heavily used by other parts of
Emacs.
If these conditions are false, then a fairly complete understanding is
in fact necessary, otherwise we will have gobs of subtle bugs on our
hands.
Also, depending on the target language, simple 1:1 translation might
make no sense, because it could yield insufficient performance. In
those cases, the translator will have to reverse-engineer the (largely
undocumented) requirements from the code, and then reimplement them
using more efficient primitives of the target language. That also
requires a fairly good understanding of what the code does, and why.
And these issues are just the tip of the iceberg.
Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Alexis, 2015/10/11
Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Fabrice Popineau, 2015/10/11
Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, John Wiegley, 2015/10/11
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Óscar Fuentes, 2015/10/15
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Eli Zaretskii, 2015/10/11
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Óscar Fuentes, 2015/10/11
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language,
Eli Zaretskii <=
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Óscar Fuentes, 2015/10/15
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Eli Zaretskii, 2015/10/11
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Óscar Fuentes, 2015/10/12
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Eli Zaretskii, 2015/10/12
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Paul Eggert, 2015/10/15
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Steinar Bang, 2015/10/15
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Marcin Borkowski, 2015/10/12
- Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, David Kastrup, 2015/10/12
Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Richard Stallman, 2015/10/15
Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language, Rustom Mody, 2015/10/12