40 ms·

Some years ago the a clisp maintainer actually made a minimal demo of Emacs hosted on clisp with just a compatibility layer for Elisp via macros/functions, whic

by mjn 12y ago

Some years ago the a clisp maintainer actually made a minimal demo of Emacs hosted on clisp with just a compatibility layer for Elisp via macros/functions, which seemed to work pretty well. But it didn't progress any further because Stallman vetoed basing Emacs on Common Lisp (he considers CL to be too big a language, and to some extent just doesn't like it). In retrospect I'm not sure this was a good call: Guile as a general VM with custom infrastructure to support both Scheme and Elisp is not really a more clean, minimalistic infrastructure anyway. The semantics of Elisp/Scheme are too different to be able to just stick in a Scheme implementation with a smallish compatibility layer, like you could with Elisp hosted on CL.

JulianMorrison 12y ago
Too often it seems RMS is why GNU can't have nice things.
- fleitz 12y ago
  RMS would never let practicality get in the way of ideology. The GNU/RMS is best because you're free! (As long as your computing needs are a text editor, compiler, and some unix system utils)
  - rurban 12y ago
    That's why I believe their FFI plans are doomed. We implemented FFI's for emacs over the last decades, but RMS always strongly opposed it, because you could call windows DLL's then. gtk-emacs e.g.
    - deng 12y ago
      RMS is fine with an FFI as long as you cannot use it to inject non-free code. This is usually done by requiring an exported symbol saying that the code is GPL compatible. GCC does it this way: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugin-API.html https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugin-API.html
      - rurban 12y ago
        But you cannot call that a FFI then. A FFI is the abbrevation for "Foreign Function Interface", not "Friendly Function Interface". FFI's are not sugar coated.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  If he made the opposite call, and adopted CLisp, you'd be complaining about him anyway, in a thread about some unexpected compatibility problem or whatever. It gets tiresome even to watch.
  - JulianMorrison 12y ago
    Uh, no. Common Lisp is sensible. It's multi-implementation and several of the implementations are JVM levels of fast, while others are highly portable. There's a community, standards, and libraries. It's not where the froth of lisp experimentation is happening, but it's effective and a known quantity.
- deng 12y ago
  You are aware though that without RMS we wouldn't have Emacs?
mark_l_watson 12y ago
Are you sure that Richard Stallman does not like Common Lisp? Several years ago he asked me about the possibility of my releasing my out of print Common Lisp book (published by Springer-Verlag) under the GNU documentation license. I would have liked to do that but I couldn't find my manuscript word processing files.
- mjn 12y ago
  I found some of the messages I was thinking of (this stuff is scattered across many years of debates, so there are probably others). Clisp maintainer on how loading Elisp into clisp was a weekend's work (2002, but talking about work from "a couple of years ago"): https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2002-08/msg00040.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2002-08/msg00... Stallman arguing "Common Lisp is extremely complicated and ugly" and "would bloat Emacs terribly" (2010): https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00612.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00...
  - mark_l_watson 12y ago
    +1 thanks for those links. You are probably correct about Richard's view of Common Lisp.
davexunit 12y ago
>Guile as a general VM with custom infrastructure to support both Scheme and Elisp is not really a more clean, minimalistic infrastructure anyway Guile is already a general VM meant to support many different languages, not only Scheme. I think it's a very clean solution to use Guile's efficient VM, and I don't think minimalistic is a useful criterion.

by mjn 12y ago

JulianMorrison 12y ago

Too often it seems RMS is why GNU can't have nice things.

fleitz 12y ago
RMS would never let practicality get in the way of ideology. The GNU/RMS is best because you're free! (As long as your computing needs are a text editor, compiler, and some unix system utils)
- rurban 12y ago
  That's why I believe their FFI plans are doomed. We implemented FFI's for emacs over the last decades, but RMS always strongly opposed it, because you could call windows DLL's then. gtk-emacs e.g.
  - deng 12y ago
    RMS is fine with an FFI as long as you cannot use it to inject non-free code. This is usually done by requiring an exported symbol saying that the code is GPL compatible. GCC does it this way: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugin-API.html https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugin-API.html
    - rurban 12y ago
      But you cannot call that a FFI then. A FFI is the abbrevation for "Foreign Function Interface", not "Friendly Function Interface". FFI's are not sugar coated.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
marcosdumay 12y ago
If he made the opposite call, and adopted CLisp, you'd be complaining about him anyway, in a thread about some unexpected compatibility problem or whatever. It gets tiresome even to watch.
- JulianMorrison 12y ago
  Uh, no. Common Lisp is sensible. It's multi-implementation and several of the implementations are JVM levels of fast, while others are highly portable. There's a community, standards, and libraries. It's not where the froth of lisp experimentation is happening, but it's effective and a known quantity.
deng 12y ago
You are aware though that without RMS we wouldn't have Emacs?

mark_l_watson 12y ago

Are you sure that Richard Stallman does not like Common Lisp? Several years ago he asked me about the possibility of my releasing my out of print Common Lisp book (published by Springer-Verlag) under the GNU documentation license. I would have liked to do that but I couldn't find my manuscript word processing files.

mjn 12y ago
I found some of the messages I was thinking of (this stuff is scattered across many years of debates, so there are probably others). Clisp maintainer on how loading Elisp into clisp was a weekend's work (2002, but talking about work from "a couple of years ago"): https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2002-08/msg00040.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2002-08/msg00... Stallman arguing "Common Lisp is extremely complicated and ugly" and "would bloat Emacs terribly" (2010): https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00612.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00...
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  +1 thanks for those links. You are probably correct about Richard's view of Common Lisp.

davexunit 12y ago

>Guile as a general VM with custom infrastructure to support both Scheme and Elisp is not really a more clean, minimalistic infrastructure anyway Guile is already a general VM meant to support many different languages, not only Scheme. I think it's a very clean solution to use Guile's efficient VM, and I don't think minimalistic is a useful criterion.