Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Oleh Krehel <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2015 14:48:47 +0200
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> I think slowly moving the Emacs C core to C++ is a good idea.  The two
> languages are supposed to be largely compile-compatible, i.e. g++ can
> understand what was meant for gcc.

C++ is a dying language.  On my daytime job we have difficulty
recruiting C++ programmers for the last 2-3 years.  Why should we
invest a non-trivial amount of effort, just to get to another language
that is foreign to most contributors?  It sounds like waste of
precious resources.

> I've been trying to get into understanding Emacs C core, but it's just
> so hard with all those macros around.

A macro is just like a function when used.

Maybe adding more comments will help.  Don't hesitate to ask questions
and point out places where things are hard to understand.

> I think even replacing `#define`
> with `const` would be a huge improvement, worthwhile of the switch.

Standard C supports 'const', and we use it quite a lot in Emacs
sources.