Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Przemysław Wojnowski]

W dniu 2015-10-12 21:43, Eli Zaretskii napisał(a):
> I don't think this is possible.  Some slowdown will be inevitable.
IMHO the performance is overestimated.

Look at Java based IDEs - Idea, Eclipse, Netbeans, etc.
All of them have been written in _slow_ Java (at least according
to C standard) and run on _slow_ JVM. But all of them are able to
attract more users that Emacs, which has core in blazing fast C.

The truth is that nobody cares about performance as long as it is
_good enough_. Of course it is important, but, as many other
things, to some level, beyond which further progress in that
direction doesn't matter much and other features become important.
Moreover, the value of performance will change over time (probably
decrease) as can be seen through last decades, because computers
have more resources.

I started the topic with the keyword "maintainable", because IMHO
it's very important factor for long living and growing projects.
In such projects (proprietary and open source) people come and
go with the knowledge and skills they had. So, from project
existence standpoint, it's important to make it easy for the new
developers to acquire the knowledge from the code/docs/whatsleft.

Languages will come and go (sometimes stay longer, though), but
if the code is easy to reason about, test, modify, etc. then it
will be easier to move (maybe even translate) to another language,
find bugs, and find new people who will be able to work with it.

IMHO C lacks basic abstractions that reduce conceptual weight of
any subsystem/library/concept/etc. Interfaces and namespaces do.
Static typing would also help.