Re: Emacs and Gnome Canvas

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> > C++ is not the fastest language to get a job done.
>> 
>> That's very true. Unfortunately, AFAIK there is no Free high quality
>> cross platform GUI for Lisp :-)
>
> If we are talking a throw-away project, why not Python?

That's a lot of work, because requires creating the necessary
bindings. With C++ all Emacs structures and functions are readily
accessible.

> I meant link-time and run-time compatibility, not syntactic
> compatibility.

I use C code on my C++ projects all the time, without those issues. Why
Emacs should be different?

>> Apart from reading all the source code, I hope that it is possible to
>> look into just a few header files for learning the interface of the
>> display engine.
>
> Unfortunately, I'm not sure.  The header is dispextern.h, but if you
> read through it, you will find that it mixes internal details of the
> current implementation with external APIs in a way that discerning one
> from the other is not trivial.

I was expecting that and it is the reason why I'm not very enthusiastic
about studying the source code.

> I would suggest instead to study the basic display iterator (defined
> as `struct it') and the iteration process, implemented in two parts:
> get_next_display_element and set_iterator_to_next.  These two and the
> subroutines of get_next_display_element (next_element_from_*) are
> where you see all the top-level features that the current display
> engine implements; reading the relevant parts of the ELisp manual will
> complete the picture regarding each one of the features.

Noted. Thanks!