[Ffmpeg-devel] SVN dump

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 05:21:21PM -0400, Dave Dodge wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 05:48:01PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> > Hmm.... imagine an Emacs with Lua as its embedded language... :) :) :)
> 
> Unfortunately this requires two things:
> 
>   1) Porting, or continuing to support, all of the existing elisp code
>      so that emacs will continue to be emacs.  I believe it's been
>      tried many times before (e.g. "JEmacs is a re-implementation of
>      Emacs, written in a mix of Java, Scheme, and ELisp") and usually
>      ends in tears.

I didn't mean GNU/XEmacs as-is, but rather an editor built on the same
principles of extensibility/customizability/self-documenting/etc. but
with Lua instead of elisp. Sorry; the word "Emacs" is pretty
ambiguous. Let's just take it to mean "editor macros". :)

>   2) Delving into the emacs core C code.  From tiny glances at it over
>      the years, merely observing that code may be enough to destroy
>      whatever quantum-mechanical magic allows it to work at all.  I
>      just risked my sanity by glancing at lisp.h, and yes it appears
>      they are still using tagged pointers.

Indeed, it's a portability nightmare... XEmacs is immeasurably better
in terms of code cleanliness, porability, and lack of 1980's-style
implementation hacks, but sadly it's unusably outdated and corrupts
UTF-8 files (even many fully valid ones) when you load and resave them
due to conversion to/from legacy MULE charset which is not a superset
of Unicode. So I'm still using GNU Emacs..

Rich