Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/12/2015 05:48 AM, Oleh Krehel wrote:
> I've been trying to get into understanding Emacs C core, but it's just
> so hard with all those macros around.

I dislike those macros too, and have gotten rid of more than my share of 
them, typically replacing them with inline functions (e.g., XFLOAT) or 
with enum constants (e.g., BITS_PER_CHAR). Much more work could be done 
in this area. This part largely doesn't need C++, and the few places 
where it might benefit from C++ typically require so much C++ foo that 
it's not clear it's worth the hassle.

I suppose the main advantage of C++ over C, for something like the Emacs 
core, would be encapsulation. But here again, it's not clear that C++ 
would be enough of a win. The ways in which the Emacs core are poorly 
encapsulated are largely independent of C vs C++. Changing it to be 
better-encapsulated C++ would not be that much of a win over changing 
the current Emacs to be better-encapsulated C.

Of course all of this is sheer speculation. I haven't attempted 
rewriting major sections of the Emacs core into C++ and I suspect nobody 
else has either. Until that is attempted, we're just guessing. (And I'm 
not volunteering!)