Re: Introducing emacs-webkit and more thoughts on Emacs rendering (was Rethinking the design of xwidgets)

[Akira Kyle]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 03:12 PM, Alexander Adolf 
<alexander.adolf@condition-alpha.com> wrote:

> A very personal caution with respect to webkitgtk2 on macOS.
>
> We are using webkitgtk in another OSS project, and building it 
> in macOS
> is a huge pain. You have to patch it (and devise new patches 
> when a new
> version is released), and compiling it takes hours 
> (literally). When a
> new webkitgtk version comes out, the pain starts all over 
> again. This
> has gotten to the point that currently there is no macOS build 
> of that
> OSS project.

Thankfully I haven't committed myself to ever needing to build 
webkitgtk with this project, it's just a dependency relegated to a 
package manager (unless you run GNU/Linux From Scratch).

> And on top you have a webkit implementation readily available on 
> the
> macOS platform. Hence, we are actively seeking to either replace
> webkitgtk with something that works cross-platform, or - in case 
> there
> isn't any such beast - to write a GTK-style wrapper for the 
> macOS
> webkit.
>
> Thus, my very personal take would be that making webkitgtk a 
> requirement
> is probably not a promising approach if macOS is to remain on 
> the list
> of supported operating systems of this package (assuming that it 
> would
> end up being a package, of course).
> Looking forward to your thoughts,

It's not even on the list of supported systems right now, so I 
think I'm safe. In fact part of my motivation for emacs-webkit was 
precisely because the recently merged xwidget webkit for ns 
actually seemed to work better than the webkitgtk one. Actually on 
x11 the webkitgtk xwidget is pretty much unusable because it 
constantly flickers, but so does emacs-webkit and I haven't been 
able to figure out why.

If you do write a GTK-style wrapper for macOS's ns webkit, that 
would certainly make it easier to run there, however the lisp 
portion of emacs-webkit is agnostic to the C module's 
implementation which mostly just wraps around the necessary 
functions of webkitgtk's api. Since it's webkit under the hood the 
ns webkit api is pretty much the same, just in objective-c (or 
swift). So it should just be a as straight forward as writing a 
different dynamic module for ns webkit, but which exports the same 
C functions as the current webkitgtk one. I don't run macOS 
anymore as they've increasingly made it hostile to customize and 
develop on outside of xcode, which can't hold a candle to emacs of 
course (not to mention its sooo not free). Maybe if someone sent 
me one of those shiny new apple silicon macbooks I'd make an 
emacs-webkit which worked on macOS, but I'm pretty fond of my 
current Pinebook Pro ;)