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There is an amazing project of converting Emacs into the more modern language - Rust (the C parts of it). It is called REmacs[1]. It is sad that the port of Ema

by xvilka 7y ago

There is an amazing project of converting Emacs into the more modern language - Rust (the C parts of it). It is called REmacs[1]. It is sad that the port of Emacs to Guile[2] didn't work out. And for the people who want to convert their C code to Rust, I quite recommend trying c2rust[3] transpiler and refactoring tool. [1] https://github.com/remacs/remacs https://github.com/remacs/remacs [2] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs [3] https://github.com/immunant/c2rust/ https://github.com/immunant/c2rust/

rtpg 7y ago
reading the GuileEmacs thing it sounds like the project was a success? Is there pushback against using this upstream?
- xvilka 7y ago
  It was working, but not good enough, indeed.
- bjoli 7y ago
  Guile is supposed to be the GNU extension language, which meant there was a political incentive for guile Emacs, but it was never asked for by the Emacs people. Considering the amount of bikeshedding going on for faaaar less intrusive changes to Emacs, I have doubted guile Emacs success for a long time. Guile now runs elisp, although there is a lot of low hanging fruit left when it comes to optimization. Guile is shaping up to become a very neat little VM, with proper threading, JIT compilation, and delimited continuations. I think the idea of elisp running outside of Emacs, with access to all of the gory glory of Emacs libraries sounds fantastic. Imagine org-mode and a (emacs PKG org-mode) library you can use outside of Emacs with a sub 0.1s startup :)
banachtarski 7y ago
I'll be honest, I feel like such a project is a waste of time, in a similar vein to many such "port to Rust" projects. Even the project page itself gives vague and rather suspect motivation for why such a project should exist. I could appreciate it if there were legitimate architectural concerns that need to be addressed (see, for example, neovim).

by xvilka 7y ago

rtpg 7y ago

reading the GuileEmacs thing it sounds like the project was a success? Is there pushback against using this upstream?

xvilka 7y ago
It was working, but not good enough, indeed.
bjoli 7y ago
Guile is supposed to be the GNU extension language, which meant there was a political incentive for guile Emacs, but it was never asked for by the Emacs people. Considering the amount of bikeshedding going on for faaaar less intrusive changes to Emacs, I have doubted guile Emacs success for a long time. Guile now runs elisp, although there is a lot of low hanging fruit left when it comes to optimization. Guile is shaping up to become a very neat little VM, with proper threading, JIT compilation, and delimited continuations. I think the idea of elisp running outside of Emacs, with access to all of the gory glory of Emacs libraries sounds fantastic. Imagine org-mode and a (emacs PKG org-mode) library you can use outside of Emacs with a sub 0.1s startup :)

banachtarski 7y ago

I'll be honest, I feel like such a project is a waste of time, in a similar vein to many such "port to Rust" projects. Even the project page itself gives vague and rather suspect motivation for why such a project should exist. I could appreciate it if there were legitimate architectural concerns that need to be addressed (see, for example, neovim).