Re: Preview: portable dumper

[Filipe Silva]

I agree with Daniel here (both Daniels). There is no shortage of linux kernel hackers and​ it is written in C. Plus I think that is a consensus that C is not dying anytime soon. 

Can't say the same for elisp.

On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 4:50 PM, David Requena Zabala <address@hidden> wrote:

Paul Eggert wrote:

> I sympathize with Daniel about the politics of this. This is not the sort of change that we'd ordinarily create a new branch for, and the way this is being handled will likely discourage further contributions.

While I cannot really make an informed judgment merits of the portable dumper versus the sometime-to-come fast one-big-elc-file, and won't touch the branch vs master issue,  I can tell you this:

The only argument against portable dumper adoption I've seen amounts to "it's coded in C", and the perceived (bad) consequences of the fact.

Of course surely I'm not representative of the general programmer population. Stil, as a once would be emacs C contributor, I sense a definite avoid-anything-C-just-for-being-C atmosphere in the project.

You might remember me from a few months ago, asking about non-toolkit scrollbars on win32 emacs.
At that point:

- I was willing to learn about learning enough about emacs core and win32 to get those scrollbars.
- I was willing to incorporate any requested changes to better integrate into emacs code base, coding style guidelines, whatever...
- I was willing to go through the burden of the copyright attribution process.
- I wasn't willing to argue ad nausea about the merits of yet another feature implemented in C.

So these scrollbars never left my own private emacs build. In the process I never took the chance of leveraging my newly acquired knowledge and become a more regular emacs contributor.

One might wonder to which degree the current C hacker scarcity in the project could actually be caused by the very attitude the Project management holds against C features.