On: Emacs under Clojure

[agentultra]

tromey started a project to port Emacs to pure CL (http://tromey.com/blog/?p=709). Why not help him out instead of dividing the effort?

[JoelMcCracken → agentultra]

Clojure just has more velocity than CL at this point. I'd rather see the Clojure port, personally.

It would be nice, though, to see both!

[astine → agentultra]

While I really hope Tromey's effort succeeds, I really think that this is probably a different effort with different goals. Porting Emacs to CL would greatly strengthen the platform Emacs is written on and would add a lot of features for free. Porting Emacs to the JVM, however, might also provide that, but would also provide simple access to the Java ecosystem, which would be a substantial boon.

[agentultra → astine]

Could compile it with ABCL and get the same thing from a single code-base.

[cheez → agentultra]

Scratching your own itch is powerful.

Besides, getting up to speed on someone else's madness is not worth it most of the time.

[malkia → agentultra]

There is an "emacs" written in pure CL - LispWorks - yes it's commercial, and not exactly the same as emacs - but very close. Some versions of LispWorks comes with the whole source of the editor, and the environment.

[mhd → agentultra]

Didn't Erik Naggum try his hand at a CL/CLIM port years and years ago?

[PuercoPop → mhd]

Yeah, climacs. http://common-lisp.net/project/climacs/

By the way. Porting the C part is one thing but what to do about all the emacs lisp packages? a compat mode?

[agentultra → PuercoPop]

See http://tromey.com/blog/?p=778 where he talks about some of the difficulties.

tldr; Theoretically it should just work. There are some tricky bits.

[zellyn → agentultra]

Anyone know his current status?