[ 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
