3 ms·

Is AI able to measure the ratio of craft to cruft source lines of code in Emacs over its lifetime?

• sillysaurusx 7mo ago
  Not AI, but I studied it extensively for about 6 months. I was trying to port Emacs to JS, line by line, about eight years ago. I love Emacs' design. I think the cruft is minimal, and pretty much every line of code I studied had a good reason for being there. And I also think there's a lot to learn from studying how Emacs is implemented. Few people will probably do this, but it was a nice experience for me. I learned a lot about gaps, text properties, how buffers are implemented, how the eval function works (it's surprisingly complicated between buffer-local variables and thread-local variables, but it's hard to think of a simpler alternative), and how intervals are implemented.
  • thecloudlet 7mo ago
    It’s not easy… I’m working to understand it. Recording the process through the way.
    • sillysaurusx 7mo ago
      I'd like to hear about it as you go! If you have any questions, definitely contact me. Love me some emacs.
      • thecloudlet 7mo ago
        Thanks!
  • scroy 7mo ago
    Why were you trying to port it to JS?
    • sillysaurusx 7mo ago
      It was fun, and I wanted to see how far I could get. Plus emacs in a browser without emscripten was appealing to me.