The GNU Emacs Architecture: Unlocking the Core [pdf]

Post by aquariusDue » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

FergusArgyll wrote: post #7

iLemming wrote: post #4

It looks great. I have not read it to completion just yet, but merely scrolling through the document leaves me with a feeling that the author got tired and decided "this is a good stopping point." To be fair, writing a book about Emacs is a Sisyphean effort by definition - this sea is a bottomless abyss of hackery abundance, and any meaningful effort to explain it is worth a celebration.

I have a silly little vibe coded extension where I can star certain HN commenters so I know who to look for in which threads (just puts a small symbol next to the username) You are for emacs, happy to see you here... :)

Post by bjourne » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC

shakow wrote: post #12

iLemming wrote: post #4

It looks great. I have not read it to completion just yet, but merely scrolling through the document leaves me with a feeling that the author got tired and decided "this is a good stopping point." To be fair, writing a book about Emacs is a Sisyphean effort by definition - this sea is a bottomless abyss of hackery abundance, and any meaningful effort to explain it is worth a celebration.

> the author got tired and decided "this is a good stopping point." Or the deadline was closing in, as this is a university thesis ;)

Post by tra3 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #14

hgp22 wrote: post #9

Love to see that Emacs can still capture the atention of new CS students.

Emacs is like a hackers' playground. It's an editor, it has a Lisp, networking support, tools, IRC, Email, Usenet and more by default, a PDF reader, a calculator (with gnuplot support it has graphs), a doc generating platform, an agenda, a silly chatbot...

Post by shawn_w » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 11:41 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #8

iLemming wrote: post #4

It looks great. I have not read it to completion just yet, but merely scrolling through the document leaves me with a feeling that the author got tired and decided "this is a good stopping point." To be fair, writing a book about Emacs is a Sisyphean effort by definition - this sea is a bottomless abyss of hackery abundance, and any meaningful effort to explain it is worth a celebration.

The Emacs' bundled documentation on Elisp (both the intro and the rest) are pretty much complete enough. On Elisp and multithreading/processing, well, just look at bordeaux-threads in Common Lisp where the support is not universal for Clisp. SBCL and ECL work, but...