Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Ludovic Courtès]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> skribis:

>> From: address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès)
>> Cc: address@hidden
>> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 22:51:26 +0200
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> skribis:
>> 
>> > In any case, Emacs can never be satisfied with the current Guile
>> > infrastructure for i18n.  There are too many shortcomings, some of
>> > them were mentioned here.  Yes, Guile can be fixed to be better in
>> > that area, but no one is working on that, AFAIK, and what's more
>> > important, lead Guile developers don't even agree Guile should move in
>> > that direction.  (This especially puzzles me: to have a good example
>> > before you and not follow it?  Emacs learned what it has now the hard
>> > way, have paid in blood, sweat and tears for that knowledge, and still
>> > Guile developers think they "know better"?  Present parties excluded,
>> > of course.)
>> 
>> My point is: Emacs can keep doing its own thing in that area.
>
> Of course.  But that takes away a serious chunk of arguments in favor
> of Guile-based Emacs, for 2 reasons: (a) there will have to be a
> non-trivial translation layer between the two, and (b) a very large
> part of Emacs's C core will have to be left intact, instead of
> removing it because Guile already does that.

AFAIK nobody claims that Guile is the right choice due to its i18n
support.

The main claims are: the compiler, VM (which would no longer be part of
Emacs), FFI, libraries, etc.

That chunk isn’t taken away.

>> (And I would guess that neither C++, nor Lua, nor anything else would
>> provide an i18n infrastructure that would satisfy Emacs out-of-the-box.)
>
> Of course.  But the Guile alternative is being brought up as being
> much better than those others.  If we leave the strings and i18n
> alone, a large part of that argument goes away.

Guile strings are fine, thank you.  I’ve used a bunch of
language/environments and honestly, I’m definitely not ashamed of what
Guile provides, contrary to what David and you seem to imply.

I fail to follow the reasoning anyway, but I don’t have much to add.

Thanks,
Ludo’.