Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2015-10-11, at 10:17, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

> Przemysław Wojnowski <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Hello everybody,
>>
>> Recently I was going through Emacs C code and immediately one thing
>> come to my mind: "Did anyone consider rewrite it a more maintainable
>> language?" :-)
>
> Emacs is mostly written in Emacs Lisp.  C is used only for the core.
> Encapsulation, namespaces and modularity are not really an issue there
> as it is a closed and confined working set.
>
> They are an issue in Elisp.  So if you are worried about
> maintainability, rewriting Elisp into a more maintainable language would
> be by far more effective.

One thing that comes to my mind when I read this discussion is something
that was mentioned (AFAIR) on one of Emacs blogs a few years ago (or
so).

That is, it might be a good idea to move some parts of Emacs core (which
are not system-dependent or performance-critical, e.g., parts of
interactive behavior like `self-insert-command' might fit here) from
C to Elisp.  We would gain at least two (connected) important things
this way:

1. more of Emacs code would be easier to understand for more people.
And hence,

2. (even) more of Emacs would be customizable without C wizardry.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University