Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[David Kastrup]

Przemysław Wojnowski <address@hidden> writes:

> W dniu 16.10.2015 o 18:11, Eli Zaretskii pisze:
>> In any case, Emacs can never be satisfied with the current Guile
>> infrastructure for i18n.  There are too many shortcomings, some of
>> them were mentioned here.  Yes, Guile can be fixed to be better in
>> that area, but no one is working on that, AFAIK, and what's more
>> important, lead Guile developers don't even agree Guile should move in
>> that direction.  (This especially puzzles me: to have a good example
>> before you and not follow it?  Emacs learned what it has now the hard
>> way, have paid in blood, sweat and tears for that knowledge, and still
>> Guile developers think they "know better"?  Present parties excluded,
>> of course.)
>
> Is i18n the only obstacle?
> IOW if someone would improve Guile's i18n infrastructure to match that of
> Emacs, would it be included into Emacs?

Don't underestimate the effort, but I think that is the largest obstacle
currently.

> To be clear, I'm not asking to make a pressure on you, but only in
> context of motivation. If someone would know that i18n is the only
> obstacle,

It certainly isn't, but it's the elephant in the room.  Emacs is very
good at dealing with lots of textual stuff without getting confused and
in many cases being capable of perfect reproduction.  That's all rather
important for making GUILE a universal extension language for multiple
applications.  So it's not just for Emacs' sake.

> maybe this person(s) would find motivation to do the job. Without that
> it is discouraging.

Well, the other non-easy problem is that of nil, '(), and #f.  The rest
seems comparably straightforward.

So there would be still work remaining, and sort of a fight for getting
there.  But currently there is not even a fight: Guile-Emacs is not a
serious contender.

-- 
David Kastrup