Re: Shrinking the C core

[Eli Zaretskii]

[Redirected to emacs-tangents.]

> From: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2023 05:46:37 +0200
> 
> Mnjah; you know as well as I, and I have written it in the very first
> mail why I want Emacs in Lisp. There are already other applications and
> editors inpsired by Emacs, that is not the question. Problem with them
> is they can't run Emacs applications and they don't have Emacs manual
> and the well written documentation. I think it would be waste of the
> effort of many people to throw it away. You may disagree and that is OK.

It will not be a waste of effort if the "neo-Emacs" will take into
consideration the main lessons we learned during those 40 years, and
will have a different architectural design to avoid the pitfalls and
allow extensions we cannot currently support.  Reimplementing the same
design in a different language, be it SBCL, Python, Go, Rust, or
whatever -- that _is_ a waste of effort, because you will have the
same Emacs with the same basic restrictions and limitations, which are
really not expected from a modern GUI program.  We tolerate them in
Emacs because in return we get so much and because the performance is
still reasonable as long as we can live with the limitations, but
starting a radically new implementation from the same point with the
same basic design means that we will have to tolerate those same
limitations for decades in the future, and that's simply silly.  The
net result will be a huge effort, lots of work to stabilize the result
to be anywhere close to what we have now, and all that for what?

Which is why anyone who understands the internals well enough to do
the job will never do it.

Yes, this can be done in principle.  But it shouldn't.

P.S.  And don't be afraid of losing some of the applications and the
documentation -- these should be the least of your worries.  Sticking
to the same design for these reasons is ... I don't even have
civilized words to describe this kind of thinking.