16 ms·

Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

300 points by sndean 9y ago

Tomte 9y ago
I guess every language needs an Emacs port to grow up. None of those ports ever see even the tiniest beginning of something actually usable (heck, even Climacs faltered), but I'm still all for it!
- dbaupp 9y ago
  I believe this is a incremental rewrite of GNU Emacs's C portions, so is probably useable with full functionality (modulo bugs) right now.
- db48x 9y ago
  One of the cool things about Rust is that it's compatible with C. You can rewrite individual C functions in Rust, compile both halves of the program and link them together into your executable. This lets you incrementally move from a pure-C program to a hybrid, to a pure-Rust program over time. Also, 90+% of Emacs is written in Lisp which doesn't need to be ported at all. I just built it, and it's fully functional. It'll be a perfect replacement for Emacs at every stage of the port, which is really cool.
  - phkahler 9y ago
    The most (debatably) useful thing they could do is write the LISP in Rust. That might have some use. As it is, this project just creates an Emacs with more dependencies.
    - db48x 9y ago
      No, rewriting all of that Lisp code would be impossible. It's also unnecessary. The primary advantage of Rust is safety; the compiler ensures that either your code follows the rules or that it doesn't compile at all. The Lisp code, on the other hand, already has that safety. No manipulation of conses or vectors or other lisp data structures will ever result in a buffer overflow, or a null-pointer dereference, or in doubly-freed memory, or any of a hundred other of C's pitfalls. On top of that, Lisp is extremely fast to write, test, and debug. But of course, that safety only exists to the extent that the Lisp interpreter/compiler is bug-free. The C side of Emacs's code base is alternatively great and terrible, depending on how you look at it. On the one hand, 30 years of continuous development has resulted in code that works really well. On the other hand, it is very hard to extend this code to support new features (good multi-threading support has been in the works for ages, moving to lexical scoping and away from dynamic scoping has taken years, etc). This is because it's difficult to maintain quality and compatibility while also navigating such an old project. Once enough of this old C code is rewritten in Rust, it'll be possible to leverage the memory safety features (and the type system) of Rust to innovate much more quickly. Not as quickly as you can innovate on code that's written in Lisp, but much more quickly than you can innovate on the C code. Besides, the number of libraries that a program uses is only a detriment if it means that the developers have to spend more time installing and maintaining those libraries. Cargo makes this comparatively painless.
      - phkahler 9y ago
        >> No, rewriting all of that Lisp code would be impossible. I thought the lisp was written in C and so moving it to Rust would be useful. Perhaps it's written in itself. If that's the case then my bad. I did not mean rewrite the list parts in rust.
        mijoharas 9y ago
        > I thought the lisp was written in C I am unclear about what you mean by this? The lisp in emacs is elisp ([0] emacs lisp). More generally, Lisp is the name given to a class of languages including Guile, Racket, Scheme, Common Lisp that generally feature homomorphism, functional style and parentheses to enable the homomorphism. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp
        mijoharas 9y ago
        Just re-read this comment, and I of course mean homoiconicity, not homomorphism which doesn't make sense in this context.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity
        phkahler 9y ago
        I checked wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp The LISP interpreter is written in C. I was trying to suggest that it may be useful to rewrite that in Rust. That is a necessary step in getting rid of the C dependencies for emacs.
BeetleB 9y ago
Not intended to be a port, but I occasionally search for an editor that is customizable in Python to the extent Emacs is. Leo Editor (http://leoeditor.com http://leoeditor.com) fits that bill. It's been around since the 90's (and the web page looks like it's from the 90's). Even though it has many users, the documentation is quite poor. If I had another life to live, I would learn it well and improve the docs - and then port over everything I like in Emacs to it. It is sorely in need of more tutorials. You'll find some in various people's blog posts, but not enough. I know enough of it to know that it is very powerful, but not enough to use it well day-to-day.
- Aaliyah5654 9y ago
  My mothers neighbour is working part time and averaging $9000 a month. I'm a single mum and just got my first paycheck for $6546! I still can't believe it. I tried it out cause I got really desperate and now I couldn't be happier. Heres what I do, •••••••••>> http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
- Philipp__ 9y ago
  That looks interesting thanks for sharing. Too bad it wasn't meant to be run on macOS.
  - Ainsleylopo 9y ago
    I've made $64,000 so far this year working online and I'm a full time student. Im using an online business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great money. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Heres what I do, •••••••••>> http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
  - BeetleB 9y ago
    >Too bad it wasn't meant to be run on macOS. What makes you say that?
    - Philipp__ 9y ago
mschaef 9y ago
This looks like a lot of work for what amounts to very little end-user benefit. Honestly, I'd rather see more progress on the Emacs Lisp/Guile migration than on a putative C/Rust migration. At least with the Guile switch, it's something that will have an obvious (and probably positive) impact on the people that use the editor.
- dbaupp 9y ago
  It seems a bit rude to complain about volunteers for doing something they want to do rather than what you want them to do. I imagine that this, for the most part, isn't even opportunity cost: the people working on it probably wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs (or the Guile effort) anyway. And this sort of effort seems like it could be an on-boarding experience to improving the original code base, e.g. in the process of porting, someone notices a bug and so submits a patch upstream, or maybe the repeated exposure to a variety of the internal components gives someone enough familiarity with them to contribute if this project peters out.
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    It wasn't a complaint, it was an honest observation.
    - hammerandtongs 9y ago
      Irrelevant. Honesty doesn't keep it from being useless stop energy.
    - Aileen343 9y ago
      Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... https://is.gd/qKRnJt https://is.gd/qKRnJt
  - mschaef 9y ago
    I intended it more as a friendly suggestion or observation than anything else. Looking at the Github README, I see a lot of enthusiasm for Emacs and Rust, but not much justification for the (tremendous) effort of a port. Losing site of the value produced in the end result seems like the kind of 'software engineer mistake' I've made myself (many times) in the past. In any event, I think we would do volunteers a disservice if we placed them in a special class to which we could only provide positive feedback. (Maliciousness is never appropriate, of course.)
hammerandtongs 9y ago
Doesn't seem to have a copyright assignment policy in place so this can't be upstreamed as is. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Copyright-Assignment.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Co... So opened - https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/238 https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/238
- josteink 9y ago
  I wish one day the FSF would actually show genuine trust in their GPL and ditch their requirement for people to provide copyright assignments. God knows how many GPLed lines of code has not been submitted back upstream to them over this minor technicality, and that's such a shame. I honestly think this is for the FSF to fix, not everyone else.
  - gnuvince 9y ago
    As I understand it, it's not lack of trust, but rather that if a legal dispute occurs, it's easier if only one party is the copyright holder rather than having to find hundreds of developers scattered around the world.
    - josteink 9y ago
      Let's say that argument is fair enough, at least in theory. How many legal disputes have the FSF had recently, in practice, where this turned out crucial? More specifically: how much have they gained by this vs how many contributions have they lost? Until proven otherwise, I'd expect them to clearly be in the negative here.
      - torrent-of-ions 9y ago
        So you'll wait until the FSF finds it cannot defend the GPL in court and then try to get copyright assignments from thousands of programmers? That's downright stupid. If there was evidence that some third party could enforce GPL compliance on behalf of the copyright holder(s) then maybe the FSF should consider relaxing the requirements. Do you recall that Sony failed to comply with the GPL when they used LAME? The LAME community wasn't prepared to actually do anything about it. That's the kind of shit that would happen, especially to smaller projects. There are big companies out there that want to use your hard work without compensation and shit all over the GPL. Never forget that.
hammerandtongs 9y ago
Some speculatively useful things that could arise out of this - It may have useful security properties over time. People use emacs for a great deal of arbitrary text reading and transform from things directly from email and the web. Elisp would largely be at fault for security bugs but perhaps this would help in areas. Perhaps a binding to use Alacritty directly for a port to Wayland? Emacs has a pretty terminal centric view of its UI output as is. A tight binding to Servo allowing a serious upgrade to Emacs visual and ui capabilities.
- taeric 9y ago
  Most security holes in my setup aren't likely to go away. I trust Emacs. And I trust it to do as I say. This means coordination my identity to many servers at a time. Executing directly on the box. Even remote boxes. I'm open to be surprised. But I really do want Emacs to have full access to my computer.
- moosingin3space 9y ago
  A while ago, when this project had just started, I filed an issue to discuss the windowing/GUI system: https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/25 https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/25
- petecox 9y ago
  Servo, as in rendered using HTML5? I guess if new management at Mozilla relaunched Firefox OS as BootToServo then the killer app from day one could be Emacs.
Myrmornis 9y ago
The README doesn't say much about whether and how the rewrite would differ from the main Emacs implementation in terms of threading architecture. A major problem (I think this is an uncontroversial statement) with the main Emacs implementation is that it is fairly common, in every day use, to block the main thread responsible for accepting keyboard input and repainting the screen etc. This (again, uncontroversial I think) is embarrassing in such an otherwise great bit of software in 2017.
- somedudetbh 9y ago
  IMHO, as someone who absolutely loves emacs, this is the biggest problem with emacs.
njharman 9y ago
Makes sense. Rust is systems language and emacs is an OS replacement.
Iknowbetter 9y ago
What are the benefits of porting to rust? Sorry, I'm a little unfamiliar with it.
coldtea 9y ago
I'd like to see a community-driven port of Sublime Text to Rust, with a basic ST3 like cross-platform UI, and offering a base set of UI primitives (buttons, panels, dropdown, inline styled annotations, etc) available for plugins, and first class support for JS plugins/extensions.
- frou_dh 9y ago
  Doesn't port imply having access to the original sourcecode? There are many unrelated editors that have cloned aspects of Sublime to varying degrees in the 2010s.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Well, cleanroom re-implementation if you prefer.
    - michaelmrose 9y ago
      Really not worth doing there don't appear to be any unique aspects worth copying and its closed source.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        It's not about having unique aspects. The Plan 9 editor is unique -- and nobody cares for it. It's about having useful aspects. And ST3 is the best example we have of a native, fast, modern, cross platform, plugin-able editor.
        mijoharas 9y ago
        Apart from emacs of course. (depending on what you mean by modern...)
- RazrFalcon 9y ago
  xi-editor looks like the best solution for me.
kronos29296 9y ago
Looks promising. First neovim and now this. Even if it doesn't replace emacs (which it won't) if it can enrich the community and maybe bring more users while fixing archaic code bases of hard to find errors and UBs then it is still a win. Neovim pushed vim (Vim suddenly became more active around the time neovim gained traction atleast according to github graphs and releases). So I hope this project brings new life to the core C code in emacs and fixes the problems that it never had (according to the core dev knowledge). When I tried emacs I found it to be a bit like atom at startups. Couldn't get into the keybindings coming from vim. If it gets faster, I might give it a try again (in evil ofcourse, gotta have them keys).
- cies 9y ago
  > Even if it doesn't replace emacs (which it won't) I dunno. First of all it wants to replace the C-bits of Emacs, not all that is in elisp land. Second of all, why not? I do not think the goals of Remacs are overly ambitious: port the C-platform under Emacs's elisp env to Rust. This will probably result in a much healthier and hackable codebase for that functionality, as it: is a more modern language, has less legacy (platforms) to support, is fully open source (Rust) to the level RMS would approve of.
Blackthorn 9y ago
What a lovely idea! Question to the devs: are you planning on redoing how the gui subsystem works, to work with (for example) the gtk event loop? I've always wanted to try to put a qt frontend on emacs, but have always been horrified away by that subsystem.
- aaptel 9y ago
  I'd say its unlikely to happen as they are aiming for bug-for-bug compatibility.
0xbear 9y ago
Prediction: within a year this project will be dead due to the lack of uptake. It doesn't solve any real problems and uses a relatively obscure programming language. There's no way it will ever reach anything close to a critical mass.
comradesmith 9y ago
What we need next is Rim to start the next phase of the holy wars.
- wtetzner 9y ago
  Like the xi editor? https://github.com/google/xi-editor https://github.com/google/xi-editor Though I guess it's not actually a port of Vim, just a vi-like editor.
  - moosingin3space 9y ago
    Xi isn't vi-like, although it is on their roadmap.
Janessa345 9y ago
I've made $64,000 so far this year working online and I'm a full time student. Im using an online business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great money. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Heres what I do, •••••>>http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
flavio81 9y ago
As one poster here said, "Makes sense. Rust is systems language and emacs is an OS replacement." If anything, it could be great if Rust is used to implement a faster Emacs Lisp compiler/interpreter, thus preserving all of Emacs Lisp source (and saving some implementation time.) And make it fully multitasking so there are no more problems of key input getting stuck because of a process.
- nieve 9y ago
  Rejoice, if you look at the repository you'll see that's exactly what they're doing - replacing the runtime/C underpinnings and keeping the elisp.
0x7a69 9y ago
As an avid emacs user... I would never use this.
- db48x 9y ago
  Why not?
shanavasm 9y ago
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/07/confession-of-cc-programmer.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/07/confession-of-cc-program...
gkya 9y ago
How hard would it be for the existing developers of CEmacs to get on board with Rust if they decided to make this the upstream core? I did not study Rust ever but did follow its evolution, and the language seems complicated to me, compared to c.
- Narishma 9y ago
  I think only a few bits of emacs are in C. The vast majority of it is elisp.
  - gkya 9y ago
    Yes but the maintainers will have to learn Rust for those little bits, no? And those bits are the most complex ones.
- random-nick 9y ago
  well rustc uses llvm, which is a competitor of gcc, so there would probably be a lot of opposition for that
- awj 9y ago
  Emacs is relatively pervasive. It runs everywhere, including plenty of platforms that Rust does not support. Either due to current support priorities or lack of LLVM support. That makes it something less than a drop-in replacement from the overall CEmacs project perspective. I'm sure Rust devs are working on more platform support, and it's possible Emacs devs are open to simply dropping some of the more obscure targets, but it might be a long time before alignment happens on that requirement alone.
NoGravitas 9y ago
This is only topic-adjacent, but here is my number one emacs wish: for the GTK frontend to be pure GTK with no X, so that it can be run directly as a Wayland client.

300 points by sndean 9y ago

I guess every language needs an Emacs port to grow up. None of those ports ever see even the tiniest beginning of something actually usable (heck, even Climacs faltered), but I'm still all for it!

dbaupp 9y ago
I believe this is a incremental rewrite of GNU Emacs's C portions, so is probably useable with full functionality (modulo bugs) right now.
db48x 9y ago
One of the cool things about Rust is that it's compatible with C. You can rewrite individual C functions in Rust, compile both halves of the program and link them together into your executable. This lets you incrementally move from a pure-C program to a hybrid, to a pure-Rust program over time. Also, 90+% of Emacs is written in Lisp which doesn't need to be ported at all. I just built it, and it's fully functional. It'll be a perfect replacement for Emacs at every stage of the port, which is really cool.
- phkahler 9y ago
  The most (debatably) useful thing they could do is write the LISP in Rust. That might have some use. As it is, this project just creates an Emacs with more dependencies.
  - db48x 9y ago
    No, rewriting all of that Lisp code would be impossible. It's also unnecessary. The primary advantage of Rust is safety; the compiler ensures that either your code follows the rules or that it doesn't compile at all. The Lisp code, on the other hand, already has that safety. No manipulation of conses or vectors or other lisp data structures will ever result in a buffer overflow, or a null-pointer dereference, or in doubly-freed memory, or any of a hundred other of C's pitfalls. On top of that, Lisp is extremely fast to write, test, and debug. But of course, that safety only exists to the extent that the Lisp interpreter/compiler is bug-free. The C side of Emacs's code base is alternatively great and terrible, depending on how you look at it. On the one hand, 30 years of continuous development has resulted in code that works really well. On the other hand, it is very hard to extend this code to support new features (good multi-threading support has been in the works for ages, moving to lexical scoping and away from dynamic scoping has taken years, etc). This is because it's difficult to maintain quality and compatibility while also navigating such an old project. Once enough of this old C code is rewritten in Rust, it'll be possible to leverage the memory safety features (and the type system) of Rust to innovate much more quickly. Not as quickly as you can innovate on code that's written in Lisp, but much more quickly than you can innovate on the C code. Besides, the number of libraries that a program uses is only a detriment if it means that the developers have to spend more time installing and maintaining those libraries. Cargo makes this comparatively painless.
    - phkahler 9y ago
      >> No, rewriting all of that Lisp code would be impossible. I thought the lisp was written in C and so moving it to Rust would be useful. Perhaps it's written in itself. If that's the case then my bad. I did not mean rewrite the list parts in rust.
      - mijoharas 9y ago
        > I thought the lisp was written in C I am unclear about what you mean by this? The lisp in emacs is elisp ([0] emacs lisp). More generally, Lisp is the name given to a class of languages including Guile, Racket, Scheme, Common Lisp that generally feature homomorphism, functional style and parentheses to enable the homomorphism. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp
        mijoharas 9y ago
        Just re-read this comment, and I of course mean homoiconicity, not homomorphism which doesn't make sense in this context.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity
        phkahler 9y ago
        I checked wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp The LISP interpreter is written in C. I was trying to suggest that it may be useful to rewrite that in Rust. That is a necessary step in getting rid of the C dependencies for emacs.

BeetleB 9y ago

Not intended to be a port, but I occasionally search for an editor that is customizable in Python to the extent Emacs is. Leo Editor (http://leoeditor.com http://leoeditor.com) fits that bill. It's been around since the 90's (and the web page looks like it's from the 90's). Even though it has many users, the documentation is quite poor. If I had another life to live, I would learn it well and improve the docs - and then port over everything I like in Emacs to it. It is sorely in need of more tutorials. You'll find some in various people's blog posts, but not enough. I know enough of it to know that it is very powerful, but not enough to use it well day-to-day.

Aaliyah5654 9y ago
My mothers neighbour is working part time and averaging $9000 a month. I'm a single mum and just got my first paycheck for $6546! I still can't believe it. I tried it out cause I got really desperate and now I couldn't be happier. Heres what I do, •••••••••>> http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
Philipp__ 9y ago
That looks interesting thanks for sharing. Too bad it wasn't meant to be run on macOS.
- Ainsleylopo 9y ago
  I've made $64,000 so far this year working online and I'm a full time student. Im using an online business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great money. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Heres what I do, •••••••••>> http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
- BeetleB 9y ago
  >Too bad it wasn't meant to be run on macOS. What makes you say that?
  - Philipp__ 9y ago

mschaef 9y ago

This looks like a lot of work for what amounts to very little end-user benefit. Honestly, I'd rather see more progress on the Emacs Lisp/Guile migration than on a putative C/Rust migration. At least with the Guile switch, it's something that will have an obvious (and probably positive) impact on the people that use the editor.

dbaupp 9y ago
It seems a bit rude to complain about volunteers for doing something they want to do rather than what you want them to do. I imagine that this, for the most part, isn't even opportunity cost: the people working on it probably wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs (or the Guile effort) anyway. And this sort of effort seems like it could be an on-boarding experience to improving the original code base, e.g. in the process of porting, someone notices a bug and so submits a patch upstream, or maybe the repeated exposure to a variety of the internal components gives someone enough familiarity with them to contribute if this project peters out.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  It wasn't a complaint, it was an honest observation.
  - hammerandtongs 9y ago
    Irrelevant. Honesty doesn't keep it from being useless stop energy.
  - Aileen343 9y ago
    Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... https://is.gd/qKRnJt https://is.gd/qKRnJt
- mschaef 9y ago
  I intended it more as a friendly suggestion or observation than anything else. Looking at the Github README, I see a lot of enthusiasm for Emacs and Rust, but not much justification for the (tremendous) effort of a port. Losing site of the value produced in the end result seems like the kind of 'software engineer mistake' I've made myself (many times) in the past. In any event, I think we would do volunteers a disservice if we placed them in a special class to which we could only provide positive feedback. (Maliciousness is never appropriate, of course.)

hammerandtongs 9y ago

Doesn't seem to have a copyright assignment policy in place so this can't be upstreamed as is. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Copyright-Assignment.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Co... So opened - https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/238 https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/238

josteink 9y ago
I wish one day the FSF would actually show genuine trust in their GPL and ditch their requirement for people to provide copyright assignments. God knows how many GPLed lines of code has not been submitted back upstream to them over this minor technicality, and that's such a shame. I honestly think this is for the FSF to fix, not everyone else.
- gnuvince 9y ago
  As I understand it, it's not lack of trust, but rather that if a legal dispute occurs, it's easier if only one party is the copyright holder rather than having to find hundreds of developers scattered around the world.
  - josteink 9y ago
    Let's say that argument is fair enough, at least in theory. How many legal disputes have the FSF had recently, in practice, where this turned out crucial? More specifically: how much have they gained by this vs how many contributions have they lost? Until proven otherwise, I'd expect them to clearly be in the negative here.
    - torrent-of-ions 9y ago
      So you'll wait until the FSF finds it cannot defend the GPL in court and then try to get copyright assignments from thousands of programmers? That's downright stupid. If there was evidence that some third party could enforce GPL compliance on behalf of the copyright holder(s) then maybe the FSF should consider relaxing the requirements. Do you recall that Sony failed to comply with the GPL when they used LAME? The LAME community wasn't prepared to actually do anything about it. That's the kind of shit that would happen, especially to smaller projects. There are big companies out there that want to use your hard work without compensation and shit all over the GPL. Never forget that.

hammerandtongs 9y ago

Some speculatively useful things that could arise out of this - It may have useful security properties over time. People use emacs for a great deal of arbitrary text reading and transform from things directly from email and the web. Elisp would largely be at fault for security bugs but perhaps this would help in areas. Perhaps a binding to use Alacritty directly for a port to Wayland? Emacs has a pretty terminal centric view of its UI output as is. A tight binding to Servo allowing a serious upgrade to Emacs visual and ui capabilities.

taeric 9y ago
Most security holes in my setup aren't likely to go away. I trust Emacs. And I trust it to do as I say. This means coordination my identity to many servers at a time. Executing directly on the box. Even remote boxes. I'm open to be surprised. But I really do want Emacs to have full access to my computer.
moosingin3space 9y ago
A while ago, when this project had just started, I filed an issue to discuss the windowing/GUI system: https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/25 https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/25
petecox 9y ago
Servo, as in rendered using HTML5? I guess if new management at Mozilla relaunched Firefox OS as BootToServo then the killer app from day one could be Emacs.

Myrmornis 9y ago

The README doesn't say much about whether and how the rewrite would differ from the main Emacs implementation in terms of threading architecture. A major problem (I think this is an uncontroversial statement) with the main Emacs implementation is that it is fairly common, in every day use, to block the main thread responsible for accepting keyboard input and repainting the screen etc. This (again, uncontroversial I think) is embarrassing in such an otherwise great bit of software in 2017.

somedudetbh 9y ago
IMHO, as someone who absolutely loves emacs, this is the biggest problem with emacs.

njharman 9y ago

Makes sense. Rust is systems language and emacs is an OS replacement.

Iknowbetter 9y ago

What are the benefits of porting to rust? Sorry, I'm a little unfamiliar with it.

coldtea 9y ago

I'd like to see a community-driven port of Sublime Text to Rust, with a basic ST3 like cross-platform UI, and offering a base set of UI primitives (buttons, panels, dropdown, inline styled annotations, etc) available for plugins, and first class support for JS plugins/extensions.

frou_dh 9y ago
Doesn't port imply having access to the original sourcecode? There are many unrelated editors that have cloned aspects of Sublime to varying degrees in the 2010s.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Well, cleanroom re-implementation if you prefer.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    Really not worth doing there don't appear to be any unique aspects worth copying and its closed source.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      It's not about having unique aspects. The Plan 9 editor is unique -- and nobody cares for it. It's about having useful aspects. And ST3 is the best example we have of a native, fast, modern, cross platform, plugin-able editor.
      - mijoharas 9y ago
        Apart from emacs of course. (depending on what you mean by modern...)
RazrFalcon 9y ago
xi-editor looks like the best solution for me.

kronos29296 9y ago

Looks promising. First neovim and now this. Even if it doesn't replace emacs (which it won't) if it can enrich the community and maybe bring more users while fixing archaic code bases of hard to find errors and UBs then it is still a win. Neovim pushed vim (Vim suddenly became more active around the time neovim gained traction atleast according to github graphs and releases). So I hope this project brings new life to the core C code in emacs and fixes the problems that it never had (according to the core dev knowledge). When I tried emacs I found it to be a bit like atom at startups. Couldn't get into the keybindings coming from vim. If it gets faster, I might give it a try again (in evil ofcourse, gotta have them keys).

cies 9y ago
> Even if it doesn't replace emacs (which it won't) I dunno. First of all it wants to replace the C-bits of Emacs, not all that is in elisp land. Second of all, why not? I do not think the goals of Remacs are overly ambitious: port the C-platform under Emacs's elisp env to Rust. This will probably result in a much healthier and hackable codebase for that functionality, as it: is a more modern language, has less legacy (platforms) to support, is fully open source (Rust) to the level RMS would approve of.

Blackthorn 9y ago

What a lovely idea! Question to the devs: are you planning on redoing how the gui subsystem works, to work with (for example) the gtk event loop? I've always wanted to try to put a qt frontend on emacs, but have always been horrified away by that subsystem.

aaptel 9y ago
I'd say its unlikely to happen as they are aiming for bug-for-bug compatibility.

0xbear 9y ago

Prediction: within a year this project will be dead due to the lack of uptake. It doesn't solve any real problems and uses a relatively obscure programming language. There's no way it will ever reach anything close to a critical mass.

comradesmith 9y ago

What we need next is Rim to start the next phase of the holy wars.

wtetzner 9y ago
Like the xi editor? https://github.com/google/xi-editor https://github.com/google/xi-editor Though I guess it's not actually a port of Vim, just a vi-like editor.
- moosingin3space 9y ago
  Xi isn't vi-like, although it is on their roadmap.

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flavio81 9y ago

As one poster here said, "Makes sense. Rust is systems language and emacs is an OS replacement." If anything, it could be great if Rust is used to implement a faster Emacs Lisp compiler/interpreter, thus preserving all of Emacs Lisp source (and saving some implementation time.) And make it fully multitasking so there are no more problems of key input getting stuck because of a process.

nieve 9y ago
Rejoice, if you look at the repository you'll see that's exactly what they're doing - replacing the runtime/C underpinnings and keeping the elisp.

0x7a69 9y ago

As an avid emacs user... I would never use this.

db48x 9y ago
Why not?

shanavasm 9y ago

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/07/confession-of-cc-programmer.html http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/07/confession-of-cc-program...

gkya 9y ago

How hard would it be for the existing developers of CEmacs to get on board with Rust if they decided to make this the upstream core? I did not study Rust ever but did follow its evolution, and the language seems complicated to me, compared to c.

Narishma 9y ago
I think only a few bits of emacs are in C. The vast majority of it is elisp.
- gkya 9y ago
  Yes but the maintainers will have to learn Rust for those little bits, no? And those bits are the most complex ones.
random-nick 9y ago
well rustc uses llvm, which is a competitor of gcc, so there would probably be a lot of opposition for that
awj 9y ago
Emacs is relatively pervasive. It runs everywhere, including plenty of platforms that Rust does not support. Either due to current support priorities or lack of LLVM support. That makes it something less than a drop-in replacement from the overall CEmacs project perspective. I'm sure Rust devs are working on more platform support, and it's possible Emacs devs are open to simply dropping some of the more obscure targets, but it might be a long time before alignment happens on that requirement alone.

NoGravitas 9y ago

This is only topic-adjacent, but here is my number one emacs wish: for the GTK frontend to be pure GTK with no X, so that it can be run directly as a Wayland client.