Re: Emacs as browser (was Re: Concurrency, again)

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Thu, 20 Oct 2016 10:33:52 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Wayland is on the horizon for Linux. X doesn't have an infinite
> > life ahead of it, it dates from the 1980s and the free OS world
> > is working to move past it (thus Wayland).
>
> Mostly irrelevant for Emacs, since we have no experts on that on
> board, and no development being done in that direction AFAIK.
> Without such development, we will be forever tied to X (and die
> when it dies), and any attempts to break those ties will end up
> like the Cairo build did, unfortunately, even though the person who
> worked on that was an excellent expert (he just left too soon).
>
> IOW, all these nice developments are just pipe dreams, as long as no
> one works seriously on adapting Emacs to them.

I have never really looked at the terminal layer stuff. (There are
four front ends now, right? MS Windows, X, NextStep and tty, yes?)

Is there any documentation about the internal interfaces between the
terminal layer and the back end? I doubt I'm skilled enough in
something like Wayland to do this work but I'd like to get a bit of a
sense of how awful the work is.

And what *did* happen to the Cairo stuff? Cairo would make Wayland
easy if I recall correctly.

> IMO, working on that is much more important for the future of Emacs
> than any other improvements, including, but not limited to, the
> "future of Emacs Lisp" discussions, the "feature/integrated-elpa"
> discussions, etc.  Developing Emacs without first-class experts on X
> on board makes no sense to me.

Perhaps no first class experts in the area are aware that Emacs needs
the help?

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger                address@hidden