Re: redisplay system of emacs

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> Nowadays, thanks to projects like LLVM, it is easy to roll an
>> industrial-grade optimizing compiler if the language runtime
>> requirements are not too far from C. It is straightforward to design a
>> language that equals C in speed of execution and that is way more
>> expressive.
>> 
>> Actually, some of those languages often compile applications to code
>> that is faster than their C counterpart, as they are more
>> optimizer-friendly.
>
> But switching to a language that is significantly less widespread than
> C would mean significantly less potential contributors.

The Emacs C codebase is, to most effects, written on a dialect of C that
requires learning by its own.

In principle, it is possible to create a language which is similar
enough to Lisp that the amount of learning it requires is similar in
magnitude to the Emacs C dialect for someone who already knows Lisp, but
being as optimizable as C and much more expressive and
maintainable. (Some people would retort that this was already tried:
that Emacs variant written on Common Lisp)

I know this is just wild dreaming given the current status of Emacs.

[snip]