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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

#21

Post by achikin »

dbaupp wrote: post #6
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.

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 cleaning up / fixing bugs / writing documentation for those endless clones.

Examples are: a lot of Linux distros, which are almost the same but not one of them comes even close to MacOSX as a desktop OS. Javascript frameworks which solve the same rendering problem again and again.

On the other side, there is Spacemacs, which tries to provide solid modern IDE-like experience on top of existing Emacs solution, leaving low-level stuff to emacs core team.

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

#22

Post by DDSDev »

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.

In response to the general critiques of "Why rewrite emacs at all!?", I believe there are hidden benefits to an incremental rewrite to Rust executed this way.

First is that remacs has been able to reduce the amount of non-Elisp code in the editor needed to implement a number of different features. It was able to do this by replacing hand rolled C functionality with high quality crates from cargo, or code in the standard library. I'd attribute this to how easy the cargo system makes implementing libraries into your project.

Second is I believe that this project overall is increasing knowledge share of not just Rust, but also mainline emacs. I personally was intimidated by looking into contributing to mainline emacs. The remacs community was so friendly and welcoming I felt very encouraged to jump in and start working on things, and now I not only have better knowledge of Rust, but a pretty decent knowledge of the C layer in emacs and how it lays out and implements it's data structures etc.

Third is that the majority of the emacs codebase is written in emacs Lisp. Remacs aims to be fully Elisp compatible, and any differences are considered bugs and should be reported. This means that the project is still able to keep up feature and bug parity with the mainline, while incrementally rewriting the core of the editor.

Disclosure: I am a contributor to this project

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

#23

Post by BeetleB »

Philipp__ wrote: post #14
BeetleB wrote: post #3

Not intended to be a port, but I occasionally search for an editor that is customizable in Python to the extent Emacs is. Leo Editor ( http://leoeditor.com ) fits that bill. It's been around since the 90's (and the web page looks like it's from the 90's). Even though it has many users, the documentation is quite poor. If I had another life to live, I would learn it well and improve the docs - and then port over every…

That looks interesting thanks for sharing. Too bad it wasn't meant to be run on macOS.

>Too bad it wasn't meant to be run on macOS. 

What makes you say that?



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

#24

Post by BeetleB »

bpicolo wrote: post #16
BeetleB wrote: post #3

Not intended to be a port, but I occasionally search for an editor that is customizable in Python to the extent Emacs is. Leo Editor ( http://leoeditor.com ) fits that bill. It's been around since the 90's (and the web page looks like it's from the 90's). Even though it has many users, the documentation is quite poor. If I had another life to live, I would learn it well and improve the docs - and then port over every…

Sublime uses a Python API, though the docs are also not extensive

>Sublime uses a Python API, though the docs are also not extensive

But how extensible is Sublime itself? For example, in Emacs I can do network connections (e.g. Gnus). Will Sublime allow this? Can I make a Tetris clone in Sublime? Both are doable in Leo.

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

#25

Post by peatmoss »

DDSDev wrote: post #22
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.

In response to the general critiques of "Why rewrite emacs at all!?", I believe there are hidden benefits to an incremental rewrite to Rust executed this way. First is that remacs has been able to reduce the amount of non-Elisp code in the editor needed to implement a number of different features. It was able to do this by replacing hand rolled C functionality with high quality crates from cargo, or code in the stand…

This is a really great description of the benefits of this sort of thing. In a code base like Emacs, I could easily see where learning the guts could be very hard / daunting for a new-comer (I've never peeked under the hood for exactly this reason).

You all are scratching an itch, and increasing the general mindshare for Emacs. If Remacs runs out of steam, then the world has some extra people who grok Emacs guts. If Remacs fully succeeds in remaking Emacs, but better, then maybe Remacs just becomes Emacs.

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

#27

Post by Aisha3242 »

BeetleB wrote: post #24
bpicolo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sublime uses a Python API, though the docs are also not extensive

>Sublime uses a Python API, though the docs are also not extensive But how extensible is Sublime itself? For example, in Emacs I can do network connections (e.g. Gnus). Will Sublime allow this? Can I make a Tetris clone in Sublime? Both are doable in Leo.

I quit working at shoprite and now I make $35h - $80h...how? I'm working online! My work didn't exactly make me happy so I decided to take a chance on something new…after 4 years it was so hard to quit my day job but now I couldn't be happier.

........... http://mcaf.ee/4ngo1k

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

#28

Post by tangue »

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...

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

#29

Post by digi_owl »

DDSDev wrote: post #22
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.

In response to the general critiques of "Why rewrite emacs at all!?", I believe there are hidden benefits to an incremental rewrite to Rust executed this way. First is that remacs has been able to reduce the amount of non-Elisp code in the editor needed to implement a number of different features. It was able to do this by replacing hand rolled C functionality with high quality crates from cargo, or code in the stand…

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.

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

#30

Post by Philipp__ »

BeetleB wrote: post #23
Philipp__ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks interesting thanks for sharing. Too bad it wasn't meant to be run on macOS.

>Too bad it wasn't meant to be run on macOS.  What makes you say that? 

It is stated in their _install-readme_ on github.
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