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Guile-Emacs Relaunched
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Guile-Emacs Relaunched
#22i have one question, for me emacs have only 1 major flaw (or you can call it drawback) , its slow, some extensions are very very slow , magit for me is the prime example , json-navigator is another will this make emacs fast , i understand guile is a nicer language than elisp, but if its not significantly faster, this i think will go nowhere (the second but minor flaw, it need better graphics, nicer ways to represent…
this is my concern as well, i think vim wins for a lot of folks because of latency and that an emacs successor should prioritize performance and low ux-interruptions in it's values and culture. fwiw, i'm much more comfortable optimizing atop guile's bytecode than elisp.
Re: Guile-Emacs Relaunched
#23No new commits yet, just a talk about a future relaunch. Only strings performance is missing. Gypsum https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/gypsum/ started from guile-emacs afresh, but is way behind. And with Andrea's elispjit the guile port is probably not needed at all.
I'd also highlight the work that's being done here:
Re: Guile-Emacs Relaunched
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cannot speak to nice graphics (I don't want a different way to represent directory trees or git branches, I'm happy with how it's done today), but on the count of Magit's speed... it's not really the problem of the language. It's the problem of how the program is written. Well, maybe in a way it is also the language. With some languages you have more room to be sloppy, with Emacs Lisp, when used in this way, you ha…
Does this mean rewriting Magit to use libgit2 FFI bindings[0] rather than subprocess calls would lead to significant speedups? [0]: https://github.com/emacsorphanage/libegit2
Maybe, but I wouldn't hold my breath. It's more about how much data needs to be fetched and how many calls have to be made to fetch it. With Maigt, it sometimes feel like a select-in-loop anti-pattern. I.e. Git only exposes information in certain slices from its database. It's hard to run free-form queries on it. Often, Magit wants to display something that cannot be phrased as a single query, so it needs to do multiple. These queries also cannot be made concurrently, or even if they could be, the concurrency overhead would've been too much.
So, using the library will remove the overhead of exec() and friends, and will definitely make the situation better, but the ultimate solution is either for Git to be more like SQL database, or for Magit to extract information directly from the Git database, rather than go through the API (but the choice of Emacs Lisp for this functionality would be highly questionable).
Re: Guile-Emacs Relaunched
#25Between this and things like Guix and Hoot, sometimes I feel like I could find incredible peace and happiness if I just sold all my possessions and moved into the Guile monestary, so to speak.
Wow that's some high praise. For anyone wondering, Hoot is a Scheme to WebAssembly compiler that is really cool (and also I'm one of the devs and also I don't live in a monastery.)
Re: Guile-Emacs Relaunched
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a kind of tragic irony of sorts, we now have VSCode (Electron based, similar in resource consumption as when Emacs was new, hence the "eight megabytes and constantly swapping" joke), using JavaScript as extension language, which was supposed to be originally based on Scheme.
VSCode is very different from Emacs in terms of philosophy. VSCode is notepad with extensions bolted on (like every other common editors). Emacs defines a more purposeful environment for working with text. And that is why you can get features like Compilation Mode, Occur Mode, systems like Org-Mode, and whole applications like magit, ebib, emms.
As someone that favoured XEmacs instead, I am well aware of the philosophy, and also why very few of newer generations even bother, as shown on its userbase share nowadays as per developer surveys.
Re: Guile-Emacs Relaunched
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
VSCode is very different from Emacs in terms of philosophy. VSCode is notepad with extensions bolted on (like every other common editors). Emacs defines a more purposeful environment for working with text. And that is why you can get features like Compilation Mode, Occur Mode, systems like Org-Mode, and whole applications like magit, ebib, emms.
As someone that favoured XEmacs instead, I am well aware of the philosophy, and also why very few of newer generations even bother, as shown on its userbase share nowadays as per developer surveys.
It’s a community project, increasing userbase should not be a priority concern. Though it should be user-friendly (emacs is as long as the user RTFM), I believe going for the common denominator instead of solving the community’s problem efficiently is less pragmatic. Before VSCode there were many, and there will be many afterwards.
And VSCode is still strongly reliant on Microsoft’s resources.
Re: Guile-Emacs Relaunched
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone that favoured XEmacs instead, I am well aware of the philosophy, and also why very few of newer generations even bother, as shown on its userbase share nowadays as per developer surveys.
It’s a community project, increasing userbase should not be a priority concern. Though it should be user-friendly (emacs is as long as the user RTFM), I believe going for the common denominator instead of solving the community’s problem efficiently is less pragmatic. Before VSCode there were many, and there will be many afterwards. And VSCode is still strongly reliant on Microsoft’s resources.
A project with dwindling community is certainly a concern.
VSCode isn't the only option, indeed.
Re: Guile-Emacs Relaunched
#29No new commits yet, just a talk about a future relaunch. Only strings performance is missing. Gypsum https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/gypsum/ started from guile-emacs afresh, but is way behind. And with Andrea's elispjit the guile port is probably not needed at all.
> And with Andrea's elispjit the guile port is probably not needed at all.
Performance aside, there's more to Guile Emacs: possibility of true concurrency, incremental garbage collection, cleaner separation of the interpreter and UI components, better maintained in the long run...
Re: Guile-Emacs Relaunched
#30Between this and things like Guix and Hoot, sometimes I feel like I could find incredible peace and happiness if I just sold all my possessions and moved into the Guile monestary, so to speak.
Wow that's some high praise. For anyone wondering, Hoot is a Scheme to WebAssembly compiler that is really cool (and also I'm one of the devs and also I don't live in a monastery.) https://spritely.institute/hoot/
I'm just a lurker but ty guys so much, doing really exciting things imo! As I waste away a little in VC startup world, yall are one of the handful of things that give me hope with all this computer/internet stuff we are working on all the time.