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posted by n1 on Friday January 13 2017, @07:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the to-vi-or-not-to-vi dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

I am delighted to announce Remacs, a project to port Emacs to Rust!

Emacs, at its heart, is a lisp interpreter written in C. In Remacs, we're replacing this C code with Rust, and all the elisp you know and love will just work.

If you've ever fancied contributing to core Emacs, this is a great opportunity to learn the internals. There's tons of low hanging fruit, we have a list of good first bugs and even a walkthrough of writing your first elisp function using Rust.

Rust is perfect for this because we can port incrementally. If you want to replace the entire regular expression engine, you can do that. If you just want to replace this function here, you can do that and the C code won't even notice. You will have a full-blown Emacs every step of the way.

[...] Remacs is based on Emacs 25.2. We've got enough type definitions that you can write interesting built-in functions, but the project is still at a very early stage. Using these, we've got a few built-in elisp functions written entirely in Rust: some arithmetic, some type checks, and even some basic list functionality.

I'll stick to MrPlow for now, thanks. He's Rust enough for me until his code stops looking like a noob wrote it.

Source: http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2017/01/11/announcing-remacs-porting-emacs-to-rust/


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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @08:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @08:19PM (#453441)

    Old code is bad because it's mature and well-debugged. It needs to be rewritten and have all sorts of new bugs introduced.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Lester on Friday January 13 2017, @10:14PM

    by Lester (6231) on Friday January 13 2017, @10:14PM (#453507) Journal

    Funny? Perhaps sarcastic, but i's not a joke. It is a very intelligent comment, he has bit in the nail

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @11:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @11:30PM (#453574)

      I guess we should count ourselves lucky that these modern-day software "engineers" aren't in a real engineering profession. They'd be trying to rework tried-and-true designs and principles because they're "old" and "legacy." We'd have a bunch bridges, skyscrapers and highways that would be falling apart due to design flaws because they thought they new better than those "old people" that came before them.

      • (Score: 1) by Lester on Wednesday January 18 2017, @12:51PM

        by Lester (6231) on Wednesday January 18 2017, @12:51PM (#455355) Journal

        I suppose it is a sarcastic answer to my comment.

        Is there any reason to knock down the Empire State Building, just to rebuild it with the same height, the same square meters, just exactly the same?. If the current Empire State Building has problems, cracks, etc, let's do it, but let's build a better building, not the same but with modern materials and tools.

        We have an old bridge paved it with two lanes where cars go up and down. If you want a wider bridge with more lanes, a stronger bridge because it has support heavy trucks, let's remove it and build another. But if we needn't more "features", the bridge is solid (maybe 1000 year there). Why should remove it?.

        I don't mean that we should stop innovation, just that starting from scratch for doing exactly the same thing makes no sense, and in the case of software is prone to new bugs, just to get the same.

        Do you want a new editor emacs-like, improving x,y,z, adding a,b,c that is too difficult to add to the current code? Code it in Rust, or Go, or Swift, or Erlang. But to get the same emacs we have now... why? It has no bugs and it looks that does what user expect it should do. Rewriting a clone in another language makes no sense, you will have the same but with more bugs. That is unless you want to test the language.

        By the way, I suppose emacs was a big improvement for those years editors state of art, but I feel happy that many people has had the idea or writing new editors, no matter in what language. As some said "Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor".

  • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday January 14 2017, @08:00AM

    by davester666 (155) on Saturday January 14 2017, @08:00AM (#453737)

    and it must be able to run in a browser.

  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Saturday January 14 2017, @04:31PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Saturday January 14 2017, @04:31PM (#453824) Journal

    Not funny but true. I get that new languages have some benefits. I was recently playing with Rust and it feels nice compared to c. But to rewrite an existing OS (not that's funny!) in Rust just for the sake of it is well... pointless. Though, far be it for me to tell someone what to do with their time. Have fun I guess.