7 ms·

In response to the general critiques of "Why rewrite emacs at all!?", I believe there are hidden benefits to an incremental rewrite to Rust executed this way.

by DDSDev 9y ago

In response to the general critiques of "Why rewrite emacs at all!?", I believe there are hidden benefits to an incremental rewrite to Rust executed this way. First is that remacs has been able to reduce the amount of non-Elisp code in the editor needed to implement a number of different features. It was able to do this by replacing hand rolled C functionality with high quality crates from cargo, or code in the standard library. I'd attribute this to how easy the cargo system makes implementing libraries into your project. Second is I believe that this project overall is increasing knowledge share of not just Rust, but also mainline emacs. I personally was intimidated by looking into contributing to mainline emacs. The remacs community was so friendly and welcoming I felt very encouraged to jump in and start working on things, and now I not only have better knowledge of Rust, but a pretty decent knowledge of the C layer in emacs and how it lays out and implements it's data structures etc. Third is that the majority of the emacs codebase is written in emacs Lisp. Remacs aims to be fully Elisp compatible, and any differences are considered bugs and should be reported. This means that the project is still able to keep up feature and bug parity with the mainline, while incrementally rewriting the core of the editor. Disclosure: I am a contributor to this project

peatmoss 9y ago
This is a really great description of the benefits of this sort of thing. In a code base like Emacs, I could easily see where learning the guts could be very hard / daunting for a new-comer (I've never peeked under the hood for exactly this reason). You all are scratching an itch, and increasing the general mindshare for Emacs. If Remacs runs out of steam, then the world has some extra people who grok Emacs guts. If Remacs fully succeeds in remaking Emacs, but better, then maybe Remacs just becomes Emacs.
- Jessica454 9y ago
  I get paid over $95 per hour working from home with 2 kids at home. I never thought I'd be able to do it but my best friend earns over 10k a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless. Heres what I've been doing, •••••••••>>http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
digi_owl 9y ago
As more of an admin kind of guy, i find this explosion of language specific repositories worrying. I have already had to deal with python code that do little to no dependency documentation, that just carpet bomb my system with stuff pulled from the net at the install stage.
- stagger87 9y ago
  (I hope I'm not misunderstanding your concern), but a quick search reveals that Rust prefers to statically link, so in this case, remacs would distribute as a 'single' binary. Only the developers (of remacs) would need all the dependencies/crates.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    This creates its own headaches as a fix for the next Heartbleed becomes not "upgrade this one shared library", but "upgrade these dozens of individual programs when an update becomes available".
    - SkyMarshal 9y ago
      There has always been war b/t static vs dynamic linking. The debate will continue forever, but it doesn't really matter anymore. Each side understands and has solutions to its deficiencies.
      - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
        Fwiw, lisps have a somewhat interesting third way: you distribute everything in a single image like a statically linked program. But, since that image includes the compiler, it can upgrade itself.
        lispm 9y ago
        Or they include a loader and can load code, code which may be compiled somewhere else.
eklitzke 9y ago
There is a huge amount of C code in Emacs that already isn't using the standard C library. As an example, the other day I noticed that Emacs has its own hand rolled implementation of mkstemp(). Unsurprisingly, the Emacs version uses a less secure implementation, so the custom implementation is of no value. A lot of people have already written about the difficulty of getting changes to fix things like this (or eliminate dead code, etc.) landed in upstream GNU Emacs. Rewriting parts of Emacs in Rust is an interesting idea, and I applaud it as a fun project. But for people who are interested in making more incremental improvements to Emacs, there's a lot of work to be done in the existing C code base to make it smaller and more secure.
- mixedCase 9y ago
  I don't see how it is any more incremental than what Remacs is trying to do. They're doing a parasitic rewrite of GNU Emacs, it's not a from-scratch implementation.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Leilani99 9y ago
    @Loise, you make $27h...good for you! I make up to $85h working from home. My story is that I quit working at shoprite to work online and with a little effort I easily bring in around $45h to $85h…heres a good example of what i'm doing, ----------------->>http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
  - Madeline44 9y ago
    Earning money online was never been easy as it has become for me now. I freelance over the internet and earn about 75 bucks an hour. Get more time with your family by doing jobs that only require for you to have a computer and an internet access and you can have that at your home. A little effort and handsome earning dream is just a click away………. http://usawork.cn.to http://usawork.cn.to
  - Evelyn533 9y ago
mschaef 9y ago
> Disclosure: I am a contributor to this project Thanks for posting this and thanks for your contributions.

by DDSDev 9y ago

peatmoss 9y ago

This is a really great description of the benefits of this sort of thing. In a code base like Emacs, I could easily see where learning the guts could be very hard / daunting for a new-comer (I've never peeked under the hood for exactly this reason). You all are scratching an itch, and increasing the general mindshare for Emacs. If Remacs runs out of steam, then the world has some extra people who grok Emacs guts. If Remacs fully succeeds in remaking Emacs, but better, then maybe Remacs just becomes Emacs.

Jessica454 9y ago
I get paid over $95 per hour working from home with 2 kids at home. I never thought I'd be able to do it but my best friend earns over 10k a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless. Heres what I've been doing, •••••••••>>http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com

digi_owl 9y ago

As more of an admin kind of guy, i find this explosion of language specific repositories worrying. I have already had to deal with python code that do little to no dependency documentation, that just carpet bomb my system with stuff pulled from the net at the install stage.

stagger87 9y ago
(I hope I'm not misunderstanding your concern), but a quick search reveals that Rust prefers to statically link, so in this case, remacs would distribute as a 'single' binary. Only the developers (of remacs) would need all the dependencies/crates.
- falcolas 9y ago
  This creates its own headaches as a fix for the next Heartbleed becomes not "upgrade this one shared library", but "upgrade these dozens of individual programs when an update becomes available".
  - SkyMarshal 9y ago
    There has always been war b/t static vs dynamic linking. The debate will continue forever, but it doesn't really matter anymore. Each side understands and has solutions to its deficiencies.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
      Fwiw, lisps have a somewhat interesting third way: you distribute everything in a single image like a statically linked program. But, since that image includes the compiler, it can upgrade itself.
      - lispm 9y ago
        Or they include a loader and can load code, code which may be compiled somewhere else.

eklitzke 9y ago

There is a huge amount of C code in Emacs that already isn't using the standard C library. As an example, the other day I noticed that Emacs has its own hand rolled implementation of mkstemp(). Unsurprisingly, the Emacs version uses a less secure implementation, so the custom implementation is of no value. A lot of people have already written about the difficulty of getting changes to fix things like this (or eliminate dead code, etc.) landed in upstream GNU Emacs. Rewriting parts of Emacs in Rust is an interesting idea, and I applaud it as a fun project. But for people who are interested in making more incremental improvements to Emacs, there's a lot of work to be done in the existing C code base to make it smaller and more secure.

mixedCase 9y ago
I don't see how it is any more incremental than what Remacs is trying to do. They're doing a parasitic rewrite of GNU Emacs, it's not a from-scratch implementation.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Leilani99 9y ago
  @Loise, you make $27h...good for you! I make up to $85h working from home. My story is that I quit working at shoprite to work online and with a little effort I easily bring in around $45h to $85h…heres a good example of what i'm doing, ----------------->>http://www.joinmate2.com http://www.joinmate2.com
- Madeline44 9y ago
  Earning money online was never been easy as it has become for me now. I freelance over the internet and earn about 75 bucks an hour. Get more time with your family by doing jobs that only require for you to have a computer and an internet access and you can have that at your home. A little effort and handsome earning dream is just a click away………. http://usawork.cn.to http://usawork.cn.to
- Evelyn533 9y ago

mschaef 9y ago

> Disclosure: I am a contributor to this project Thanks for posting this and thanks for your contributions.