[ Ben: Changing the Lisp engine is not going to affect users much. ] I totally agree with Ben that there are more important immediate issues in XEmacs development than replacement of the Lisp engine, even though swapping the Lisp engine could make a lot of development issues considerably easier. Unexec (first on Ben's list) should be one of first. I disagree, however, that changing the Lisp engine is not going to affect users. The immediate consequence of a new engine is going to be performance; XEmacs runs dog-slow in many areas, and (long-term, not ignoring the recent improvements) it has become slower faster than machines have been getting faster. People have been complaining about other aspects of the system which can only be fixed with a new substrate. Multithreading comes to mind. Also, Emacs Lisp currently is hampering the development work I can do for XEmacs. Programming idioms common among modern programming languages are painful in Emacs Lisp, and as such Emacs Lisp development is, for me, currently at least 3 times as slow as it should be, and considerably less fun. I don't enjoy it much, and thus don't do things which I otherwise would tackle. I'm aware that there are people who say they're currently happy with XEmacs Lisp, but I suspect that there are others who feel as I do, and would produce more and better code if the language substrate were different. I also conjecture that more developers would hack on XEmacs if its extension language weren't so arcane. This kind of thing would indeed affect users. I don't think it'll be necessary to halt all (or even most or a lot of) development in order to prepare and finally do the swap. I, for one, am not very interested in hacking on most of the issues you mention (not because I don't consider them important---for purely personal reasons), but have spent, am spending, and will spend considerable time and effort on the design and implementation issues involved in a swap. None of it has currently been fed into the XEmacs development process; I'll wait until I have something immediately usable. -- Cheers =8-} Chipsy Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla