Re: Emacs design and architecture

[Po Lu]

Sebastian Miele <iota@whxvd.name> writes:

> In the foreseeable future, probably not.  I do not know the details.
> But there is WebAssembly.  In order to access the DOM and possibly other
> browser API, at least a few months ago, it was still necessary to
> somehow go through JS.  But it is very unlikely that that will not
> change in a not too distant future.  There are many developements going
> on in that area that (will) make implementing further languages on top
> of WebAssembly easier and the languages and APIs interoperable with less
> and less overhead, and more and more common management (including GC).
> I have only a very superficial view.  But in the last months I gained
> the impression, that WebAssembly and standards and stuff around it
> probably will become a very versatile and interoperable VM
> infrastracture, including "WebAssamble-native" APIs to almost anything.
>
> What may be interesting in that direction, too, are experimental browser
> engines like Servo.  In the last months I read somewhere (and by people
> contributing to it) that Servo more or less explicitly has the aim to
> allow to take/use only parts of it, and to have as clear and
> approachable source code as possible.  A next generation Emacs probably
> would not need or even want all that a web browser has to support.  It
> could concentrate on a subset of web-stuff that already is known to work
> very well and efficiently.
>
> Disclaimer: I really do not know the details.  This is only a
> superficial view gained during the last months.

ISTM that it would be more productive to examine LibreOffice.  We do
wish to turn Emacs into a word processor, after all.  And LibreOffice
provides layout capabilities that are in no way inferior to those
supplies by the editors found within web browsers, all while being
designed to edit rather than display documents.

And as a second data point, none of the web browsers cited in this
thread still function on the computers I use five days a week, at my
workplace.  Nor do they support Windows XP, which I believe Eli uses.