Dynamic loading (was: Release plans)

[Eric M. Ludlam]

Hi,

Note: I'm not on the mailing list, but have been reading some threads
via the archive, so I don't have thread info in my mail headers.  Sorry.

> > > Are you beginning to see how untenable your position is?
> > 
> > No.  It may well be that, after more rigorous analysis, loadable binaries
> > in Emacs might not be a problem.  But being wrong is a long way from
> > being untenable.
>
>Sigh.  All the analysis so far has been provided by me and Tom,
>principally, with similar comments from others on the pro-DSO side.
>You just repeat your assertions, and Stallman compliments your for
>your clear statement of the issues.  Humbug!

While I personally think that dynamically loadable libraries would be
very helpful to me, I'd like to provide an example which would support
what I think Alan is worried about.

I've been working on CEDET for a long time.  It supports smart
completion for various langauges plus a bunch of other stuff.  It's
something I've been working on since 1995 or so.  The not-free
XRefactory tool uses Emacs as the editor for its UI.  It uses Emacs
Lisp, and subprocesses to do it's work.

I've seen at least two explicit instances of folks who try CEDET, have
some percieved issue, and end up using XRefactory instead because it
works for them.  By this, I mean they sent email saying this was their
intent.  Based on the number of folks who just stopped using CEDET
because it wasn't "ready yet", I'd guess there are more.

When it comes down to it, XRefactory has a lot of great stuff I just
haven't gotten to yet in CEDET.  Would more folks use CEDET, and help
identify or fix bugs in CEDET if there was no XRefactory?  I would
guess so.  I don't use it, so it doesn't affect me or my computer, but
it's existence makes it less important for others to help w/ CEDET,
and make it better because their problems are already solved.

Now, all that said, would supporting dynamic libraries in Emacs
earlier have changed any of that?  The difference would be that
XRefactory would be using dll's for some of it's stuff, but I doubt
much else would change.  I would posit that the issue already exists,
and dlls are just another flavor.  Anything you do w/ a DLL, you can
do by writing main.c with a text IO interface, compiling it, and
writing some lisp to do process IO.  It just takes longer when I'm the
one doing it.

Eric