Re: What improvements would be truly useful?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Aaron Ecay <address@hidden> writes:

> 2018ko martxoak 5an, Rostislav Svoboda-ek idatzi zuen:
>>
>
> [...]
>
>> I know it's a bitter pill to swallow, but let's face it - do we think,
>> our bellowed Emacs will ever be able to display anything like the
>> examples from https://threejs.org ?
>
> Thanks to the xwidgets support (info "(elisp) Xwidgets"), it is possible
> to embed a graphical web browser with full JS support in an emacs buffer.
> So itʼs possible to have the best of both worlds: emacsʼs support for
> text editing combined with the visualization and interactivity of modern
> Javascript libraries.

Communication with the webkit widget is not easy.  It certainly doesn’t
feel like a first-class citizen in Emacs.  It is possible to send
strings containing a JavaScript programme to the webkit widget and
retrieve simple strings from the widget, but there is no shared state.
All values crossing over the boundary between the Elisp world and the
widget need to be converted first.

We have no way to compile Elisp to JavaScript strings to smoothen out
the rough transition between these two worlds.  (Guile supports
ECMAscript and Elisp, but even in Guile Emacs the webkit widget would be
a foreign body.)

While it is a neat hack to embed an X widget in an Emacs buffer, I don’t
think that we should be using the embedded webkit widget as a display
engine.

--
Ricardo

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