Re: redisplay system of emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

Eli> That's a pretty general assessment. Any data points other than the
Eli> display engine?

Most of what Emacs's code offers is available elsewhere one way or
another in *apparently* better shape and with an active community.
That's true of the redisplay as we've been discussing, it's true of the
extension language, the GC, the coding-conversion libraries, the
wiget/menu code, and probably a lot more.

So, yes, it's probably fairly easy to do an Emacs-like editor using
another extension language etc... and the result is likely to be
cleaner, more efficient, better maintained code in many ways.
Actually such Emacs-like editors exist, using extension languages like
CommonLisp, OCaml, Haskell, Python, younameit.

The problem is that they're not Emacs, so they start with a small user
community and it's hard for them to grow.  At some point, I've
considered the possibility to switch to one of those (where the
extension language is statically typed ;-), but ... they didn't have
PCL-CVS, diff-mode, Gnus, ... so it was really an uphill battle.
Maybe later.


        Stefan