Speaking of #emacs turning 50.

There was recently a post on reddit asking if there was anything to be learned from the slopified rust rewrite that someone made.

It's problematic and buggy but *much* faster on anything UI related.

Questions were raised regarding "is it worth doing a rewrite" and "why not rewrite just the rendering stuff?"
🧵1/4

This is, of course, a classic example of Chesterton's Fence ( https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/ ).

But, after 50years #emacs is a beast. It does SO much, and has SO many moving pieces that I don't believe it's possible to understand it. I think a team of people could, if they were paid to spend their days maintaining, and improving it.

But support for critical open source internet infrastructure doesn't exist, and most devs consider emacs to be a relic of days past.
🧵3/4

@masukomi

Initially I liked the Idea of modern #emacs rewrite in #rust, real multithreading, better GC, modular codebase would been nice. But that sloppified thing just exploded some time ago. I was watching the project. Months ago it could compile and produce some buggy emacs. Nowadays most commits don't work at all and agents throw more and more shit on the pile. It is already magnitudes more LoC than emacs, not counting the zillion crate dependencies and it becomes worse every day.

An Introduction to Canvas in GNU Emacs via @tusharhero https://lobste.rs/s/9xglf3 #emacs
https://monadicsheep.org/blog/an-introduction-to-canvas-in-emacs.html

An idea for #Emacs: expand M-x doctor to answer to simple questions
such as:

- how can I open the help guide
- how can I save a file
- how can I comment a block of code

pointing to the Texinfo page as an Elisp link.

And so on. No, no LLM's required, please. If #NASA did something
like this in the 60's with Moon rock classification queries,
(with another Lisp sytem) so can you.

EDIT: typos.

I wish the #Schemas project in R7RS #Scheme suceeds. Emacs is not bad *but*
I'd prefer a native #Emacs written in #Guile not for Elisp (which is like
having something between #Maclisp and #Common Lisp). Having to switch back
and forth between languages it's tiring
(and yes, I know CL well enough to learn Elisp
like nothing, but if I'm under an Scheme environment, I want the same
Lisp flavour everywhere.

With #Emacs and Common Lisp the divergence is not that huge (SLIME), but
#LEM for #CL it's far more integrated.

Said this, if the #GNU project rewrote Emacs under Common Lisp with
Clisp (for instance, in the 90's, porting Emacs' related code with
subprojects) today we would have something much more powerful than LEM
under SBCL.
Richard Stallman doesn't like Common Lisp, he prefers the simplicity
of Elisp, but yet he agrees on having Emacs itself using cl-lib (CL
compat library for Elisp) on *tons* of core utilities and functions:

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/cl.html

Conocé el editor de texto Emacs

Venite a aprender sobre Emacs, el editor de texto extensible, personalizable y autodocumentado, desarrollado por Richard M. Stallman y la Free Software Foundation como parte del proyecto GNU.

Alt...

Conocé el editor de texto Emacs

Uhm, on 32 bit in Clozure CommonLisp (ccl):

(log (1+ most-positive-fixnum) 2)
29.0

2^29 -1 = most-positive-fixnum in CCL

#GNU #Emacs, 32 bit, compiled with --wide-int:

(log (1+ most-positive-fixnum) 2)
61.0

2^61 -1 = most-positive-fixnum in Elisp

Still, CL allows far more precision
than other languages:

CCL:

(expt most-positive-fixnum 16)
47634101215830029620862168293282105755619681803746312443773447750728239466188107611533078255091639820167255564829090159750828898191472066561

Elisp: totally wrong result.

Proof for CCL on correctness:

(log (expt (1+ most-positive-fixnum) 16) 2)
464.0

¡Atención entusiastas del Software Libre del sud! Nos juntamos en la biblioteca Aime Paine a charlar de Emacs mucho más que un editor de texto. Coordina Eicos :)

#emacs #bariloche

Alt...

Flyer de un encuentro de Emacs, el sábado 15/8/26, organizado por Comunidad Software Libre Bariloche y barca furilofche en el pip, en la Biblioteca Popular Aime Paine (Bariloche)

Remember that #GNU #Emacs was once used as an #ATC messaging router in Germany
to drive planes thanks to #ELisp:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsStories

#lisp