Live data from Hacker News

Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust

github.com

171–180 of 181 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you'll wait until the FSF finds it cannot defend the GPL in court and then try to get copyright assignments from thousands of programmers? That's downright stupid. If there was evidence that some third party could enforce GPL compliance on behalf of the copyright holder(s) then maybe the FSF should consider relaxing the requirements. Do you recall that Sony failed to comply with the GPL when they used LAME? The LA…

> So you'll wait until the FSF finds it cannot defend the GPL in court and then try to get copyright assignments from thousands of programmers?

I'll rather have code which is harder to defend than defense for code I never got.

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

#172
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may be a small thing compared to other things, but relative to a PR on Github, it's a tectonic scale difference in workload. I know plenty of people who won't bother on plain principle, and that's both people and code which the FSF is missing out on. New times. New standards. Get with the program FSF.

Missing out? I believe anybody who won't bother to compile and send the paperwork does not care enough to contribute good code anyways. There is a working, functional, and pleasing system for those who do actual work, why should a project like emacs (or any other open source project, really) chase the newest fad bargaining the layman's attention and his two lines of patch? What arrogance people show in trying to bend every project to their liking, and going as far as threathening to not do the contributions that they already aren't doing... Good god.

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

#173
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FPM is at least a step in the right direction to reduce the overhead of creating all of these. At a minimum, Linux should have a common packaging system; though there may never be agreement. It's hard to see macOS and windows endingnup with a common one. But maybe we could do a third party option that is independent of each OS? Those rarely work out well though.

And that is forgetting that are many more OSes out there than just those three.

Of course there are many more, but if you could build the one true package manager for all the major OSes, my guess is that the smaller ones would join the fray.

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

#174
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is forgetting that are many more OSes out there than just those three.

Of course there are many more, but if you could build the one true package manager for all the major OSes, my guess is that the smaller ones would join the fray.

Not really, because it would meant that their semantics weren't accounted for.

As an example, IBM just released yesterday a new mainframe model.

z/OS is a totally different animal compared with POSIX based OSes or Windows, starting by the file system, catalog based.

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

#175

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 cent…

Servo, as in rendered using HTML5?

I guess if new management at Mozilla relaunched Firefox OS as BootToServo then the killer app from day one could be Emacs.

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

#176

What a lovely idea! Question to the devs: are you planning on redoing how the gui subsystem works, to work with (for example) the gtk event loop? I've always wanted to try to put a qt frontend on emacs, but have always been horrified away by that subsystem.

I'd say its unlikely to happen as they are aiming for bug-for-bug compatibility.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> No, rewriting all of that Lisp code would be impossible. I thought the lisp was written in C and so moving it to Rust would be useful. Perhaps it's written in itself. If that's the case then my bad. I did not mean rewrite the list parts in rust.

> I thought the lisp was written in C I am unclear about what you mean by this? The lisp in emacs is elisp ([0] emacs lisp). More generally, Lisp is the name given to a class of languages including Guile, Racket, Scheme, Common Lisp that generally feature homomorphism, functional style and parentheses to enable the homomorphism. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_Lisp

Just re-read this comment, and I of course mean homoiconicity, not homomorphism which doesn't make sense in this context.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are you talking about requirements.txt? Requirements.txt falls short of cargo or really any other mainstream language's dependency doc (no reproducible builds, for one thing -- effectively almost as bad as undocumented).

Mostly requirements.txt, yes. It's a standard and it has been a really long time I used a package where I didn't find one.

What you mean by no reproducible builds?

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

#179
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bee…

> this suggests to me that, for many of us, that context is rather angry and upset.

This doesn't even seem unreasonable to me: if every time my project was discussed it was met with scepticism and outright "why are you bothering to do this?", I would get fairly tired and, after the first few times, get fed up with putting in the emotional effort to see the positive nugget buried in the negative phrasing.

Someone taking 5 minutes to write a comment about a project they've just been made aware of is unlikely to have the context to know whether that project regularly gets these sort of comments ("I really meant it as a way to learn more about the project, please, authors, can you politely answer my rudely phrased question/criticism") and so they should be the ones putting in the effort of research and of starting the conversation on a good foot: questions about the points of scepticism (rather than blank statements) are a good start.

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

#180
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like a lot of work for what amounts to very little end-user benefit. The sons of Hermes love to play And only do their best when they Are told they oughtn't; Apollo's children never shrink From boring jobs but have to think Their work important.

Brilliant. Thank you

I ought to site my source - W. H. Auden via http://www.paulgraham.com/quo.html
Post reply on HN