Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[David Kastrup]

address@hidden (Taylan Ulrich "Bayırlı/Kammer") writes:

> I haven't followed the whole discussion but I'd like to remind that
> GuileEmacs already runs currently, and from what I know none of the
> problems it faces are related to string handling.  It just lets Elisp
> strings be a separate data type.
>
> I guess the discussion was about rewriting bigger parts of Emacs in
> Guile-Scheme, which might be one possible way to go forward but not
> necessary.
>
> Most of the benefits in e.g. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs
> apply without having to solve the string problem.  Specifically, from
> the overview section, the first two points and half of the third should
> apply I think.

The first two points concern efficiency.  Emacs is _all_ about working
with strings, and the last report of GuileEmacs stated something like
GuileEmacs being about an order of magnitude slower specifically because
of having to special-case Emacs strings and buffers.

Emacs is first and foremost an editor.  Substantial increases of
efficiency in most general programming areas at the cost of abysmal
performance in text processing are not going to make the race.

-- 
David Kastrup