miércoles, 18 de octubre de 2017

rust + emacs = remacs

I've lately being collaborating a bit with the Remacs project, which attempts to bring Rust to emacs by porting the C parts of emacs. Here's the latest remacs report, by Wilfred, the creator of remacs.

If you love emacs and want to learn Rust, there's enough low hanging fruit in the project that makes a good place to start learning both the emacs internals and also rust (Which is not a simple language IMHO).

Remacs comunity is small, but quite helpful, and many things are still being figured out as migration of different parts take place.

I've personally have contributed with ports of a handful of functions (point and buffer related). Not a lot, but few steps to bring me closer to Rust and emacs at the same time.

From time to time, there's the issue raised about "what benefit do I get by using remacs instead of gnu emacs" or, "Should you try remacs?" I honestly don't know. If you don't have any interest in emacs internals and you don't usually compile your own emacs you won't gain much with remacs.  Projectwise, I don't know how gnu emacs will benefit from remacs.

Another question that raises is "if (how) gnu emacs benfits from the contributions on remacs?".  Not being a hostile fork but just a fork to experiment with different technologies at a different pace than gnu emacs, remacs is allowed to try different approaches to solving some problems. Support for very old platforms has been dropped, and the idea is to use crates (Rust libraries) for some things that emacs writes ad-hoc (json, md5, regex...).

For now, there's just a tiny fraction of users that use remacs, so it's way too early to think about any impact it may have to mainline gnu emacs.

And on the question: Aren't we moving to guilemacs? Why are you not investing your time on that? ..... For my personal case, I'll say that the low hanging fruit in guilemacs are over my skills. Not so for remacs, where I can chip in and merge my small PR's. Also, github (it's sad, but that's how it is) makes it easier for me to collaborate.

But I get you: The idea of guilemacs is very cool. You know what's also super cool? El compilador. But I don't know, I feel I'm unable to move any of those any forward, and they are still experimental.

[OFFTOPIC: I'm looking for projects where to collaborate. If you have any proposal drop me a line @ raimonster@gmail.com, and we can talk about it. Learning, experience, impact, fun and remote are my metrics nowadays ]

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