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Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

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Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

#11

Post by mschaef »

dbaupp wrote: post #6
mschaef wrote: post #5

This looks like a lot of work for what amounts to very little end-user benefit. Honestly, I'd rather see more progress on the Emacs Lisp/Guile migration than on a putative C/Rust migration. At least with the Guile switch, it's something that will have an obvious (and probably positive) impact on the people that use the editor.

It seems a bit rude to complain about volunteers for doing something they want to do rather than what you want them to do. I imagine that this, for the most part, isn't even opportunity cost: the people working on it probably wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs (or the Guile effort) anyway. And this sort of effort seems like it could be an on-boarding experience to improving the original code base, e.g. in the pro…

I intended it more as a friendly suggestion or observation than anything else. Looking at the Github README, I see a lot of enthusiasm for Emacs and Rust, but not much justification for the (tremendous) effort of a port. Losing site of the value produced in the end result seems like the kind of 'software engineer mistake' I've made myself (many times) in the past.

In any event, I think we would do volunteers a disservice if we placed them in a special class to which we could only provide positive feedback. (Maliciousness is never appropriate, of course.)

Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

#12

Post by Aileen343 »

nerdponx wrote: post #7
dbaupp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit rude to complain about volunteers for doing something they want to do rather than what you want them to do. I imagine that this, for the most part, isn't even opportunity cost: the people working on it probably wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs (or the Guile effort) anyway. And this sort of effort seems like it could be an on-boarding experience to improving the original code base, e.g. in the pro…

It wasn't a complaint, it was an honest observation.

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Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

#13

Post by hammerandtongs »

Some speculatively useful things that could arise out of this -

It may have useful security properties over time. People use emacs for a great deal of arbitrary text reading and transform from things directly from email and the web. Elisp would largely be at fault for security bugs but perhaps this would help in areas.

Perhaps a binding to use Alacritty directly for a port to Wayland? Emacs has a pretty terminal centric view of its UI output as is.

A tight binding to Servo allowing a serious upgrade to Emacs visual and ui capabilities.

Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

#14

Post by Philipp__ »

BeetleB wrote: post #3

Not intended to be a port, but I occasionally search for an editor that is customizable in Python to the extent Emacs is. Leo Editor ( http://leoeditor.com ) fits that bill. It's been around since the 90's (and the web page looks like it's from the 90's). Even though it has many users, the documentation is quite poor. If I had another life to live, I would learn it well and improve the docs - and then port over every…

That looks interesting thanks for sharing. Too bad it wasn't meant to be run on macOS.

Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

#15

Post by melling »

mschaef wrote: post #5

This looks like a lot of work for what amounts to very little end-user benefit. Honestly, I'd rather see more progress on the Emacs Lisp/Guile migration than on a putative C/Rust migration. At least with the Guile switch, it's something that will have an obvious (and probably positive) impact on the people that use the editor.

A large part of Emacs is the Lisp source. It would be great to have another interpreter written in Rust that reads the same Lisp files.

What’s the breakout of C vs Elisp?

Ideally more of Emacs could be rewritten in Lisp with a smaller interpreter.

Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

#16

Post by bpicolo »

BeetleB wrote: post #3

Not intended to be a port, but I occasionally search for an editor that is customizable in Python to the extent Emacs is. Leo Editor ( http://leoeditor.com ) fits that bill. It's been around since the 90's (and the web page looks like it's from the 90's). Even though it has many users, the documentation is quite poor. If I had another life to live, I would learn it well and improve the docs - and then port over every…

Sublime uses a Python API, though the docs are also not extensive

Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

#17

Post by achikin »

dbaupp wrote: post #6
mschaef wrote: post #5

This looks like a lot of work for what amounts to very little end-user benefit. Honestly, I'd rather see more progress on the Emacs Lisp/Guile migration than on a putative C/Rust migration. At least with the Guile switch, it's something that will have an obvious (and probably positive) impact on the people that use the editor.

It seems a bit rude to complain about volunteers for doing something they want to do rather than what you want them to do. I imagine that this, for the most part, isn't even opportunity cost: the people working on it probably wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs (or the Guile effort) anyway. And this sort of effort seems like it could be an on-boarding experience to improving the original code base, e.g. in the pro…

>the people working on it probably wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs

>in the process of porting, someone notices a bug and so submits a patch upstream

I find it a little bit controversial.

Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

#18

Post by Myrmornis »

The README doesn't say much about whether and how the rewrite would differ from the main Emacs implementation in terms of threading architecture. A major problem (I think this is an uncontroversial statement) with the main Emacs implementation is that it is fairly common, in every day use, to block the main thread responsible for accepting keyboard input and repainting the screen etc. This (again, uncontroversial I think) is embarrassing in such an otherwise great bit of software in 2017.

Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

#19

Post by Ainsleylopo »

Philipp__ wrote: post #14
BeetleB wrote: post #3

Not intended to be a port, but I occasionally search for an editor that is customizable in Python to the extent Emacs is. Leo Editor ( http://leoeditor.com ) fits that bill. It's been around since the 90's (and the web page looks like it's from the 90's). Even though it has many users, the documentation is quite poor. If I had another life to live, I would learn it well and improve the docs - and then port over every…

That looks interesting thanks for sharing. Too bad it wasn't meant to be run on macOS.

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Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

#20

Post by mschaef »

melling wrote: post #15
mschaef wrote: post #5

This looks like a lot of work for what amounts to very little end-user benefit. Honestly, I'd rather see more progress on the Emacs Lisp/Guile migration than on a putative C/Rust migration. At least with the Guile switch, it's something that will have an obvious (and probably positive) impact on the people that use the editor.

A large part of Emacs is the Lisp source. It would be great to have another interpreter written in Rust that reads the same Lisp files. What’s the breakout of C vs Elisp? Ideally more of Emacs could be rewritten in Lisp with a smaller interpreter.

The last numbers I heard were from a few years ago, but on the order of 250KLOC of C and 1MLOC of Emacs Lisp. There's a lot there (and some of it gets fairly exotic around redisplay, unexec, etc.)
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