Re: Emacs design and architecture (was: Shrinking the C core)

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 14/09/2023 19:52, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > For the other, it sounds like you'd like to have more GUI primitive
> > type operations available on the canvas directly, without having to
> > use explicit GUI objects like child frames.
> We cannot draw on the canvas directly without making the display
> engine aware of what we are drawing and where, because the display
> engine is responsible for updating the display when something changes.
> So what we need is to be able to place a glyph using arbitrary 3D
> coordinates (the 3rd coordinate for overlaying stuff on top of what's
> already displayed), instead of having to work with rows of glyphs.
>
> Again, studying what others do in this area would be useful, I think.

Perhaps the classic case is the Mozilla browser, which has from the 
beginning implemented its browser UI (chrome) using an HTML-like 
technology called XUL which also uses CSS and JavaScript for styling 
(colors, size, alignment, positioning) and scripting. Except XUL 
provided access to the platform widgets, graphical elements, menus, 
dialogs, etc. Still, it's like a web page for displaying web pages, in a 
sense.

Not sure how relevant that is for Emacs: doing a wrapper for an OS 
toolkit is a lot of work.