Re: Shrinking the C core

[Po Lu]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> In which way is it "the perfect antithesis" to my standpoint, and what
> is my standpoint?

That Emacs must be rewritten from the drawing board to leverage
multiprocessor operation.

> If you wrote:
>
> "where the only form of ``interlocking'' **is**",
>
> than it would certainly be a "perfect anthithesis", but since you are
> using the term *was* it means it *is no more*, a past tense, something
> that has changed, and change is what I have suggested.

Multiple organizations took Unix and independently transformed it into
what it is today: CMU, Novell, Sun, and of course the many volunteers
who orchestrate the development of the free BSD systems.

What fundamental issues (aside from manpower and time, of course) impede
Emacs from undergoing the same transformation?  The Unix experience
indicates that this is well-trodden ground.

> I think you are missunderstanding what I am saying: I am saying that
> design needs to be changed; and the other thing is that I am suggesting
> to rewrite the core API in CL instead of C, since you will get all those
> things that constitute the Lisp Machine out for free; a better garbage
> collector, a better threading, and better Lisp that are people are often
> asking for. Of course you can implement all that stuff in C as well, it
> just that it means redoing work that other people has done elsewhere.

Last I checked, none of the popular Common Lisp systems supported MS-DOS
or ran satisfactorily on Android, nor was Common Lisp an especially well
known language.  There is a reason Emacs is written in C, and why its
present design has endured for so long: it is portable, it is reasonably
fast, and it is a subject familiar to all programmers.

Other Lisp systems aren't panaceas either: rewritten in Common Lisp or
not, the present Emacs design will still require interlocking to operate
safely in a multiprocessor environment.  Ergo, such a rewrite will only
compound the effort needed to produce a hypothetical ``Lockmacs'' (so to
speak) with the additional pains required to rewrite Emacs in a new
language, and one very few of the present maintainers are well versed in
at that.