On Mon, Sep 11, 2023, 8:26 AM Eli Zaretskii <
eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2023 20:43:01 -0400
>
> > You are right, absolutely, but then I cannot see why people
> > can't push for a SBCL rewrite of Emacs?
>
> Because that is not up for decision. That decision is already made.
>
> If the question were up for decision, arguing for a certain choice
> would be normal participation. When it isn't, arguing for a choice is
> making life difficult. I have too much work to do, and I can't keep
> up. So does Eli. Eli can speak for himself, but if you make it necessary
> for me to spend more time on this, that is making difficulties.
IMNSHO, discussing a rewrite of Emacs in _any_ language is waste of
time and energy. We've seen this many times (because people still
insist on bringing this up from time to time). From where I stand,
the main reason is not even the fact that we decided not to do that,
but the fact that such a rewrite will never happen in practice. Such
a rewrite is a massive job which requires very good knowledge of Emacs
internals and features, and a lot of time. People who come close to
the required knowledge level are not interested in doing this job
(because they understand the futility), and those who think it should
be done simply don't know enough and/or don't have enough time on
their hands to pull it through.
If Emacs will ever be "rewritten", it will not be Emacs, but a
text-processing system with a very different architecture and design,
which will take from the Emacs experience the lessons we learned and
implement them differently, to produce a system whose starting point
is closer to the needs of today's users and whose main technologies
are more modern from the get-go.
It sounds like you have some specific ideas. I wouldn't mind hearing them at more length.
My understanding is the design is deliberately kept simple (or "simple") to make it accessible to more programmers.
Instead of discussing porting emacs to CL, why don't people work on porting the compiler techniques used in CL to emacs?
Lynn