Earlier quoted context omitted.
This creates its own headaches as a fix for the next Heartbleed becomes not "upgrade this one shared library", but "upgrade these dozens of individual programs when an update becomes available".
Programs all need to update all the time anyway.
Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust
111–120 of 181 posts
Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust
#112Earlier 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…
This is one of the main issues of open source - people tend to work on what seems fun/interesting/rewarding. As a result a lot of people work on different implementations of the same things instead of coming up with one good solution and creating new things on top of it. Moreover, while some people work on the endless clones of the same thing, the completely different set of contributors is wasting their time cleanin…
You could say the same thing about commercial software (and other) development. They just call it competition. In business they claim it is efficient and drives innovation. In open source it's said to be inefficient and a waste of time.
Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust
#113I 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. I…
Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust
#114Earlier 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…
Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
This creates its own headaches as a fix for the next Heartbleed becomes not "upgrade this one shared library", but "upgrade these dozens of individual programs when an update becomes available".
There has always been war b/t static vs dynamic linking. The debate will continue forever, but it doesn't really matter anymore. Each side understands and has solutions to its deficiencies.
Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a huge amount of C code in Emacs that already isn't using the standard C library. As an example, the other day I noticed that Emacs has its own hand rolled implementation of mkstemp(). Unsurprisingly, the Emacs version uses a less secure implementation, so the custom implementation is of no value. A lot of people have already written about the difficulty of getting changes to fix things like this (or elimina…
I don't see how it is any more incremental than what Remacs is trying to do. They're doing a parasitic rewrite of GNU Emacs, it's not a from-scratch implementation.
Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust
#118As 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
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a huge amount of C code in Emacs that already isn't using the standard C library. As an example, the other day I noticed that Emacs has its own hand rolled implementation of mkstemp(). Unsurprisingly, the Emacs version uses a less secure implementation, so the custom implementation is of no value. A lot of people have already written about the difficulty of getting changes to fix things like this (or elimina…
I don't see how it is any more incremental than what Remacs is trying to do. They're doing a parasitic rewrite of GNU Emacs, it's not a from-scratch implementation.
Re: Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust
#120Doesn't seem to have a copyright assignment policy in place so this can't be upstreamed as is. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Co... So opened - https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/238
I wish one day the FSF would actually show genuine trust in their GPL and ditch their requirement for people to provide copyright assignments. God knows how many GPLed lines of code has not been submitted back upstream to them over this minor technicality, and that's such a shame. I honestly think this is for the FSF to fix, not everyone else.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-07/msg00...
Copyright assignments allow the FSF to enforce the GPL on Emacs.