Re: Shrinking the C core

[Eric S. Raymond]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>:
> There is a plenitude of such reasons.  Whenever some code is moved to
> Lisp, its structure and history is lost.  Often, comments within the
> extracted C code remain, but the code itself is left ajar.  Bootstrap
> problems are frequently introduced, as well as latent bugs.  And Emacs
> becomes ever so much slower.

When I first worked on Emacs code in the 1980s Lisp was already fast
enough, and machine speeds have gone up by something like 10^3 since.
I plain don't believe the "slower" part can be an issue on modern
hardware, not even on tiny SBCs. 

> Finally, this specific case is because we don't want to provide Lisp
> with an easy means to bypass file name handlers.  All primitives
> operating on file names should thus consult file name handlers, enabling
> packages like TRAMP to continue operating correctly.

If calling the file-name handlers through Lisp is a crash landing,
you were already out of luck.  Go have a look at delete-directory.

> Probably.  I think a better idea for a first project is this item in
> etc/TODO:

This would ... not be my first project. :-)
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>