Re: Shrinking the C core

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > It was designed for the time of single-core slow
  > machine, and its design makes sense in that perspective. 

That is true.

                                                             However, for
  > todays multicore machines, the fact that a lisp machine is slapped on
  > top of an existing text editor (Gosslings I guess),

No, that's not how I developed it.

I first wrote Emacs Lisp as a standalone Lisp interpreter.
Then I wrote the code to handle buffers and editing the text in them.

Turning to the question of future development,
I think the design of Emacs is good enough,
To rewrite Emacs completely would be an enormous misdirected effort.

GNU Emacs is a part of the GNU opersating system,
whose goal is to provide, in the Free World, all the features
that people want.

With the same work it would take to rewrite Emacs from scratch,
we could write some other complex and powerful free program
which does some other job -- a job that there is no free software to do.

Or we could add features -- to Emacs or some other free program -- which
would greatly extend what people can do in the Free World.

Consider, for instance, the idea of extending a free spell checking
program so it could tell you the gender of each noun if you ask.
Going beyond that, maybe it could check for agreement of modifiers
with their nouns.  That would be a big help for writing in many
Indo-European languages and Semitic languages.  Perhaps also other
languages which have something grammatically like gender but not
based on gender of humans.

That would be a tiny fraction of the work that people are proposing
here.  And it would help a lot of users.

Would someone like to do it?


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)