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

[Richard Stallman]

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  > > These are internal design decisions.
  > > The last one does relate to some user-level features
  > > such as data in the buffer.  The first three don't.
  > > 
  > > So I don't see these as being related to simplicity
  > > that benefits the users.

  > That is true, by and large, but the simplicity that benefits users is
  > not the only issue at stake.  There's also the issue of being capable
  > of performing complex computations efficiently, i.e. quickly and
  > without locking up Emacs; multi-threading and a more modern GC could
  > give us at least some of that.

I agree, these kinds of changes

>   >   . "buffer with gap" for storing buffer text
>   >   . "mark and sweep" GC
>   >   . basic single-threaded MVC architecture
>   >   . display engine design around the rectangular canvas model and
>   >     on-the-fly layout decisions

could possibly be improvements.  I was arguing only against one
putative benefit, "simplicity".

  > In off-line discussions with Stefan Monnier, we both arrived at the
  > conclusion that some basic limitations of the current display engine
  > cannot be lifted without redesigning how buffer text is stored and
  > accessed.

I agree they would require something more powerful than text
properties and overlays as they are now.  Text properties were
designed to work consistently with copying text between buffers and
strings, and that imposed a limit.  What made this conceptually simple was
the idea that each character individually has its own properties.

If we add a more powerful method of attaching non-text data to
buffers, the design phase should include specifying precisely how they
would behave when copying text between buffers and strings.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)