Continued progress porting Emacs to Rust
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Re: Continued progress porting Emacs to Rust
#2 DEFUN ("atan", Fatan, Satan, 1, 2, 0,
Re: Continued progress porting Emacs to Rust
#3When I first heard of this project I thought "Well, that's insane, it will never be finished, and will surely be abandoned in six months". Glad to hear that it's making good progress! I love it when I'm wrong about stuff.
Re: Continued progress porting Emacs to Rust
#4To anyone wondering why this might be a good idea, there are some interesting comments in a GitHub issue (https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/305):
> For users, I hope Remacs will be faster (it's easier to optimise), more robust (we have stronger type checks and the ability to add unit tests), better documented (see #262) and somewhat more featureful (we have some ideas for solving the dumper problem that would allow users to dump their instance as an image) than GNU Emacs.
> I think we will get problems when the current generation of emacs devs retire and there's a better chance that emacs will survive if we try to make it more appealing to young developers. Rust seems to be a good option.
Re: Continued progress porting Emacs to Rust
#5And there are related efforts to upgrade the lisp used in emacs to a more modern and standardized version.
I think it is GuileEmacs I am remembering.
I hope to two efforts are compatible.
Re: Continued progress porting Emacs to Rust
#6And there are related efforts to upgrade the lisp used in emacs to a more modern and standardized version. I think it is GuileEmacs I am remembering. I hope to two efforts are compatible.
My thinking as well. This is a golden opportunity to replace Elisp.
Edit: Guile won't be used, because of the burden of contributing. https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/66#issuecomment-273...
Re: Continued progress porting Emacs to Rust
#7When I first heard of this project I thought "Well, that's insane, it will never be finished, and will surely be abandoned in six months". Glad to hear that it's making good progress! I love it when I'm wrong about stuff.
Remember that most of Emacs is written in Emacs Lisp. If you take the entire source code distribution, around 15% of it is written in C. Those 15% are of course fairly complex, however it's at least less code than you may think.
Re: Continued progress porting Emacs to Rust
#8When I first heard of this project I thought "Well, that's insane, it will never be finished, and will surely be abandoned in six months". Glad to hear that it's making good progress! I love it when I'm wrong about stuff.
Agreed... this seemed like it might run afoul of CADT [1], and I'm glad it hasn't.
Re: Continued progress porting Emacs to Rust
#9To anyone wondering why this might be a good idea, there are some interesting comments in a GitHub issue ( https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs/issues/305 ): > For users, I hope Remacs will be faster (it's easier to optimise), more robust (we have stronger type checks and the ability to add unit tests), better documented (see #262) and somewhat more featureful (we have some ideas for solving the dumper problem that woul…
> For users, I hope Remacs will be faster
The main reason my emacs is painfully slow is that most elisp code blocks. Stuff like hitting tab for auto-completion might perform a blocking query from a language server hanging emacs for multiple seconds. Opening a file tries to start a language server and blocks the editor in the process. Etc.
Making emacs itself faster won't make the experience of working with emacs any better.
Re: Continued progress porting Emacs to Rust
#10And there are related efforts to upgrade the lisp used in emacs to a more modern and standardized version. I think it is GuileEmacs I am remembering. I hope to two efforts are compatible.
That's the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this project but I think it might be a mistake. Convincing people (and contributors) to ditch C-emacs for "remacs" will be hard, convincing people to ditch elisp-emacs for guilemacs will be hard but doing both at the same time might be just too much.
If remacs manages to reach the point where you can use it to replace emacs in-place without any breakage while bringing better performance and more stability it will be a tremendous success IMO.