Hrvoje Niksic writes:
I'd have to learn Scheme to be able to contribute to such an
XEmacs at all.
I don't think so. I think the success or failure of whatever new
substrate gets added will depend on the quality of the Emacs-Lisp
emulation. We are going to be running code on the emulator for a
long, long time.
As an example, since I support VM for GNU Emacs and XEmacs, and
since the code and comments weigh in at over 25000 lines at this
time, and since I only hack on it part-time, it is unlikely that
I'm going to be rewriting the whole thing in Scheme or Common Lisp
or anything else. Anything that introduces significant semantic
changes that require piles of old code to be rewritten is going to
be a non-starter. (Leaving aside things like emacs-lisp debuggers,
which are bound to be a total loss.) Also if applications run
miserably slowly under the emulated Emacs-Lisp then the users will
likely vote with their feet and use something else.
So I think you'll be able to contribute for quite some time.
The last thing we want to do is scare off proven Emacs-Lisp
contributors for hypothetical Scheme or Common Lisp contributors.