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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

#91

Post by chongli »

digi_owl wrote: post #29
DDSDev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In response to the general critiques of "Why rewrite emacs at all!?", I believe there are hidden benefits to an incremental rewrite to Rust executed this way. First is that remacs has been able to reduce the amount of non-Elisp code in the editor needed to implement a number of different features. It was able to do this by replacing hand rolled C functionality with high quality crates from cargo, or code in the stand…

As more of an admin kind of guy, i find this explosion of language specific repositories worrying. I have already had to deal with python code that do little to no dependency documentation, that just carpet bomb my system with stuff pulled from the net at the install stage.

language specific repositories worrying

What is the alternative? Every major Linux distro has its own repository, as do all the BSDs. The picture on Windows and macOS is even more convoluted. Are developers in all these languages supposed to support the packaging of their software in half a dozen different repositories?

Maybe all programmers should get together and build "one repository to rule them all"? I have no idea how we herd that many cats!

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

#92

Post by wtetzner »

wott wrote: post #68
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…

I see no problem in anyone willing to toy with whatever he likes. I have a problem when huge efforts are invested by huge teams on huge projects which clearly have no purpose . I mean, if you have a lot of energy to use and give, and you want to clone something huge, clone one the proprietary tools that have no free/open source equivalent yet in your domain or one of the domains where there are the most serious lacks…

> I have a problem when huge efforts are invested by huge teams on huge projects which clearly have no purpose.

This strikes me as a very entitled viewpoint. Why should people work on what you want them to work on? They could be watching TV or playing video games in their free time, but if they work on a project you don't think is valuable, it's somehow a problem?

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

#93

Post by cies »

kronos29296 wrote: post #67

Looks promising. First neovim and now this. Even if it doesn't replace emacs (which it won't) if it can enrich the community and maybe bring more users while fixing archaic code bases of hard to find errors and UBs then it is still a win. Neovim pushed vim (Vim suddenly became more active around the time neovim gained traction atleast according to github graphs and releases). So I hope this project brings new life to…

> Even if it doesn't replace emacs (which it won't)

I dunno. First of all it wants to replace the C-bits of Emacs, not all that is in elisp land. Second of all, why not? I do not think the goals of Remacs are overly ambitious: port the C-platform under Emacs's elisp env to Rust. This will probably result in a much healthier and hackable codebase for that functionality, as it: is a more modern language, has less legacy (platforms) to support, is fully open source (Rust) to the level RMS would approve of.

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

#94

Post by db48x »

Tomte wrote: post #2

I guess every language needs an Emacs port to grow up. None of those ports ever see even the tiniest beginning of something actually usable (heck, even Climacs faltered), but I'm still all for it!

One of the cool things about Rust is that it's compatible with C. You can rewrite individual C functions in Rust, compile both halves of the program and link them together into your executable. This lets you incrementally move from a pure-C program to a hybrid, to a pure-Rust program over time.

Also, 90+% of Emacs is written in Lisp which doesn't need to be ported at all.

I just built it, and it's fully functional. It'll be a perfect replacement for Emacs at every stage of the port, which is really cool.

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

#95

Post by flavio81 »

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.

>It would be great to have another interpreter written in Rust that reads the same Lisp files.

Agree, but then we would have a new case of Greenspun's 10th rule.

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

#96

Post by jasonm23 »

chongli wrote: post #91
digi_owl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As more of an admin kind of guy, i find this explosion of language specific repositories worrying. I have already had to deal with python code that do little to no dependency documentation, that just carpet bomb my system with stuff pulled from the net at the install stage.

language specific repositories worrying What is the alternative? Every major Linux distro has its own repository, as do all the BSDs. The picture on Windows and macOS is even more convoluted. Are developers in all these languages supposed to support the packaging of their software in half a dozen different repositories? Maybe all programmers should get together and build "one repository to rule them all"? I have no i…

Sounds like xkcd 927 ...

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

#97

Post by nine_k »

Symbiote wrote: post #64
baq wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with python the rule should to be to run every deployment at least in its own venv.

That's not so practical if the application is a text editor, or some other administration tool (debugging, statistics etc).

My rule of thumb is to never install anything into system Python by pip, etc. If it's not an OS package, it belongs to a virtualenv.

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

#98

Post by flavio81 »

As one poster here said, "Makes sense. Rust is systems language and emacs is an OS replacement."

If anything, it could be great if Rust is used to implement a faster Emacs Lisp compiler/interpreter, thus preserving all of Emacs Lisp source (and saving some implementation time.)

And make it fully multitasking so there are no more problems of key input getting stuck because of a process.

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

#99

Post by dbaupp »

mschaef wrote: post #11
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…

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 disser…

Both are good points, but I think it's always good to remember the humans behind work, even if you don't think it's useful work. It's perfectly reasonable to be unconvinced of the value of a project, but that doesn't mean one needs to be entirely "stop energy" (to take a nice phrasing from a now dead comment).

Fortunately, your top level comment was taken in good faith by one of the contributors, but this won't always happen (and, especially in a space like editors, where everyone uses them and many people have unreasonably strong opinions, so people doing "unconventional" things may have a history of feeling attacked for their hobby) but not phrasing a comment as uncompromising criticism can encourage productive discussion (instead of randoms like me bringing up non-technical things like this whole subthread).

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

#100

Post by Jessica454 »

peatmoss wrote: post #25
DDSDev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In response to the general critiques of "Why rewrite emacs at all!?", I believe there are hidden benefits to an incremental rewrite to Rust executed this way. First is that remacs has been able to reduce the amount of non-Elisp code in the editor needed to implement a number of different features. It was able to do this by replacing hand rolled C functionality with high quality crates from cargo, or code in the stand…

This is a really great description of the benefits of this sort of thing. In a code base like Emacs, I could easily see where learning the guts could be very hard / daunting for a new-comer (I've never peeked under the hood for exactly this reason). You all are scratching an itch, and increasing the general mindshare for Emacs. If Remacs runs out of steam, then the world has some extra people who grok Emacs guts. If…

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