Re: [External] : Re: Shrinking the C core

[Po Lu]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> [Redirected to emacs-tangents]
>
>> From: Gerd Möllmann <gerd.moellmann@gmail.com>
>> Cc: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>,  Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>,
>>  arthur.miller@live.com,  acm@muc.de,  luangruo@yahoo.com,
>>  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2023 06:38:00 +0200
>> 
>> "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com> writes:
>> 
>>  > But it could be done. There is a technical path forward to it.
>> 
>> Which would have to cope with buffer-local bindings.
>
> Right.  And the display code.  And text en/decoding.  And input queue.
> And faces.  Etc. etc. -- these are all written in C, but are full of
> Lisp data structures and calls into Lisp, so separating them is
> anything but easy or even straightforward.

Which are all components that have grown immensely in both volume and
complexity over the past 20 years or so, which is to say, since you
(Eric) last expended significant amounts of time developing Emacs.  Not
a single individual understands everything, particularly not to the
extent necessary to orchestrate a rewrite or re-implementation.

> People who have enough talents, knowledge, and energy to do this kind
> of job will be better off

So it is already a stretch to assume that such people will materialize
at all.