Re: redisplay system of emacs

[Paul R]

Hi Eli,

>> As many emacs youngsters, I feel that emacs really uses too much
>> home-made code. Surprisingly, Emacs does not benefit that much from
>> the free software ecosystem.

Eli> That's a pretty general assessment. Any data points other than the
Eli> display engine?

Emacs Lisp and all the librairies that emacs hackers had to implement on
top of it, IOW the 'emacs lisp standard library'.

Since 80ies, many languages appeared, and many of them meet very well
the requirements to extend a text editor. And because they are
general-purpose language, they do much more. Designing a language,
implementing it, maintaining it, providing a large and up to date
standard library, is a project on its own. Scheme, Ruby or Python come
to mind. The latters, at least, come with extensive support to parsing,
file operations, networking and so on.

Eli> "Big job" is an understatement of the century. Most of these
Eli> "generic free software fragments" are not written with Emacs
Eli> peculiar requirements in mind, and don't have a Lisp API.

Yes you are right. I'm mostly thinking loud how could be designed emacs
in today landscape.


-- 
  Paul