Re: Consideration for Rust contributions in Emacs

[Po Lu]

Troy Hinckley <comms@dabrev.com> writes:

> Thanks Sean! 
>
> I should have been clearer in my question that I don’t have any Rust code 
> that I want to contribute to GNU Emacs, and I don’t know anyone who
> does. This is a hypothetical. 
>
> I don’t think Rust should be added to the Emacs core. The core is well tested 
> and battle hardened C and Rust would not add much value. 
>
> I guess a clearer question would be: are there any fundamental/ideological 
> reasons Rust could not be part of GNU Emacs? Ignoring technical
> trade offs and complexity etc.

There are no real ideological reasons.

The fundamental reason, however, is that Rust is an unstable language,
it is difficult to learn, and it is not portable.  And Emacs has a long
history of being asked, by others, to rewrite itself in a such languages
for benefits that never materialize.

> Are there others? I am particularly interested in issues surrounding
> licensing, such as the question I posed above about libraries.

As I explained earlier, it is probably morally fine if the library is
free software, as long as it does not promote SaaSS, load proprietary
software itself (think web browsers), et cetera.

For it to be legal, the library must be GPL compatible, or a system
library, but nothing says it has to be under the GPL itself.