3 ms·
one really nasty conflating issue is that emacs uses a mess of globals. partially because of the domain but largely because of dynamic binding and the lack of n
by convolvatron 4y ago
one really nasty conflating issue is that emacs uses a mess of globals. partially because of the domain but largely because of dynamic binding and the lack of namespaces.
emacs really needs to be hoisted onto another language and runtime. everyone says this but no one can really conceive of doing this and rewriting or at least refactoring all the elisp extensions.
I guess guile emacs is still alive? I should really try installing it
- rurban 4y agoguile-emacs has atrocious string performance
- pzone 4y agoGuile-Emacs is no longer alive. The only other project similar since then has been remacs, but that aimed to replace the C core, not elisp. It also lost momentum. I believe adding parallelism to elisp will be more feasible and successful than another rewrite. It's not a bad language really.
- __d 4y agoI wonder if it would be possible to automatically rewrite the elisp code to whatever new runtime was chosen? Assuming the new language is still more-or-less a Lisp ... maybe?
- samus 4y agoThe issue is always the parts where the two language semantics differ too much. And then, you usually have too much legacy code that would be impacted by changes in those areas. That's the hard part. You lost when that code lies beyond some organizational boundary, e.g., a separate project that has is too big in its own right to refactor in one go, or where the maintainers have sufficient clout to resist such a change. Such a transformation would effectively entail a fork of that project.