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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

#141

Post by rkangel »

omegaham wrote: post #88
pera wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Emacs user one could see zero gain in this effort. But new languages like Rust do benefit (I believe) from this kind of projects: new libraries may be create for this port that could be useful for completely new applications. Also, it's more users/testers for Rust, which is always a good thing for their community.

Another thing is that having large-scale successful projects make Rust a more likely language for other people to choose when creating a new project themsleves. "It's a neat language, but no one has used it to make anything that isn't a toy" is a really common mindset for the people who make such decisions. The only way to change that mindset is for the evangelists to write software and show that yes, it is possible…

Rust has always had an advantage in this respect as it was being used to write servo. "Good enough for Mozilla to write a browser rendering engine" (I believe) helped a lot of people take it seriously early on and helped build the community.

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

#142

Post by ethelward »

curun1r wrote: post #129
taktoa wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix(OS) is basically that... If only we could get upstream to start building with Nix

Ugh...no. I tried Nix until I found that all packages that depended on OpenSSL were broken on OS X. I checked for a bug report and found that one had been filed and sat open and unfixed for 18 months. Given that this bug makes Nix basically unusable on OS X, it seems like developers of Nix are uninterested in becoming anything resembling a universal package manager. Meanwhile, cargo works flawlessly on every system I…

> Given that this bug makes Nix basically unusable on OS X, it seems like developers of Nix are uninterested in becoming anything resembling a universal package manager.

Or that they just don't have enough manpower to actually support all the platforms.

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

#143

Post by baq »

Walkman wrote: post #122
bennofs wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python has/had a terrible packaging story though. As you said, dependencies weren't really documented. Rust, on the other hand, documents all dependencies in Cargo.toml. And dependencies can easily be parsed from Cargo.toml without the need to execute any code (as would be required in the case of python)

> Python has/had a terrible packaging story though. As you said, dependencies weren't really documented. I wonder where have you lived? I rarely found (if ever) an undocumented dependency list for any serious Python project in the last couple of years.

python's packaging, especially compared to state of the art which cargo represents, is really, really poor. documenting direct dependencies is just a start. requirements.txt is somehow simplistic and complex at the same time (remember about the special options which thankfully aren't used too much) and you can also list dependencies in setup.py, too.

there's the Pipfile initiative which gives me much hope, though :)

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

#145

Post by mschaef »

dbaupp wrote: post #99
mschaef wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alway…

> one needs to be entirely "stop energy" (to take a nice phrasing from a now dead comment).

I'm sorry that comment got down modded. In fact, I think/hope I voted it up.

One of the interesting tensions this dialog has surfaced (at least for me) is the relationship between volunteerism and the way outsiders interact with the volunteer community. More than a few people effectively suggested my comment shouldn't have been made. While I do agree with the need to protect contributors from a lot of what they have to put up with, I'm not sure I'd ring fence those communities quite that securely.

Put another way, if my comment really does fall into a class of those that shouldn't have been made, what are the 'rules' for outsiders engaging open source (or other volunteer) communities?

> Fortunately, your top level comment was taken in good faith

Agreed. But after 30 years on the net, it still surprises me how many people just automatically default to whatever the 'bad faith' interpretation might be. We all read what we read in our own context, and this suggests to me that, for many of us, that context is rather angry and upset.

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

#146

Post by mschaef »

tangue wrote: post #28
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.

STOP/ I just think that before judging remacs everyone had to read this blogpost: http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2017/04/30/remacs-talk-transcr...

Thanks for posting this. I agree with one of the other commenters that this is probably the most informative comment on the thread. (And, to be honest, the kind of answer I was hoping to get to my initial post.)

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

#147

Post by josteink »

gnuvince wrote: post #89
josteink wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As I understand it, it's not lack of trust, but rather that if a legal dispute occurs, it's easier if only one party is the copyright holder rather than having to find hundreds of developers scattered around the world.

Let's say that argument is fair enough, at least in theory.

How many legal disputes have the FSF had recently, in practice, where this turned out crucial?

More specifically: how much have they gained by this vs how many contributions have they lost?

Until proven otherwise, I'd expect them to clearly be in the negative here.

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

#148

Post by gkya »

josteink wrote: post #69
hammerandtongs wrote: post #8

Doesn'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.

It's just a snail mail of a single page once and for all. If it helps FSF and GNU, that's no big deal for me. I compiled the form and sent it to US from Turkey, and all it took me was about 5 Lira's and a walk to the post office.

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

#150

Post by random-nick »

gkya wrote: post #149

How hard would it be for the existing developers of CEmacs to get on board with Rust if they decided to make this the upstream core? I did not study Rust ever but did follow its evolution, and the language seems complicated to me, compared to c.

well rustc uses llvm, which is a competitor of gcc, so there would probably be a lot of opposition for that
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