Remacs: Re-Implementing Emacs In Rust

[wizard69]

Reinventing the wheel in Rust became a real popular sport lately ...

Yes and I have to really wonder if it makes sense or could be considered a waste of time. Something to think about. Honestly EMACS was never my cup of tea but on the other hand it is a pretty stable system so why mess with it? I'd rather see them implement a version of Eclipse, or something like it, because that editor is far from stable but yet has some neat concepts that make it a useful IDE type editor.

[L_A_G]

You're very blind. There is benefit in a project like this. Working on projects like this can open the door to expanding the number of libraries available on Crates.io to solve similar problems. Remacs could split emacs up into generic modules that would be useful in a wide range of projects. If everyone went with your point of view, science and technology would never progress. There are always discoveries being found in places that people consider to 'provide no tangible benefit to anyone'.

Learn to read because I didn't say that people shouldn't do useless stuff, just that I can understand people who do. Understanding why people have certain opinions does not mean you agree with them.

As for splitting emacs into generic modules usable in other projects, there's an absolutely enormous amount of languages you can do that in. If that's really your goal, you may as well try to re-implement emacs in Visual Basic or something...

Seriously thou, as far as language fanboys go, Rust ones are probably the most obnoxious ones I've ever encountered. They seem to act like Rust is the greatest thing ever and try to somehow pretend like everything should be implemented in it. I guess that's to be expected when it was supposed to replace C++, but now that it's once again developing at a fairly rapid pace for a language of it's age rather than Rust eating C++'s lunch, C++ is eating Rust's lunch.

Tell that to the Big Bang....

The big bang started out with everything that exists in the universe today, it merely spread it out allowing it to form everything from sub-atomic particles to celestial bodies. Hell, if you talk about matter and energy as two separate things it lost most of the matter that was there in just after the big bang took place when matter and dark matter fought it out.

As I said, if Rust was really going to go places it would have already done so, but even the project that created it for it's own purposes is only this year, several years after it was introduced, finally rolling out something made with it.

[mmstick]

Learn to read because I didn't say that people shouldn't do useless stuff, just that I can understand people who do. Understanding why people have certain opinions does not mean you agree with them.

As for splitting emacs into generic modules usable in other projects, there's an absolutely enormous amount of languages you can do that in. If that's really your goal, you may as well try to re-implement emacs in Visual Basic or something...

Seriously thou, as far as language fanboys go, Rust ones are probably the most obnoxious ones I've ever encountered. They seem to act like Rust is the greatest thing ever and try to somehow pretend like everything should be implemented in it. I guess that's to be expected when it was supposed to replace C++, but now that it's once again developing at a fairly rapid pace for a language of it's age rather than Rust eating C++'s lunch, C++ is eating Rust's lunch.


The big bang started out with everything that exists in the universe today, it merely spread it out allowing it to form everything from sub-atomic particles to celestial bodies. Hell, if you talk about matter and energy as two separate things it lost most of the matter that was there in just after the big bang took place when matter and dark matter fought it out.

As I said, if Rust was really going to go places it would have already done so, but even the project that created it for it's own purposes is only this year, several years after it was introduced, finally rolling out something made with it.

Hilarious. This basically sums up your mentality: I feel marginalized by Rust -- it is hurting my C++ feelings -- waa waa boo hoo. If you think the Rust community is obnoxious, it's merely because your obnoxious attitude is backfiring on you.

[ssokolow]

Seriously thou, as far as language fanboys go, Rust ones are probably the most obnoxious ones I've ever encountered. They seem to act like Rust is the greatest thing ever and try to somehow pretend like everything should be implemented in it. I guess that's to be expected when it was supposed to replace C++, but now that it's once again developing at a fairly rapid pace for a language of it's age rather than Rust eating C++'s lunch, C++ is eating Rust's lunch.

By definition, C++ can't take on Rust's core strengths without ceasing to be C++.

The big strength that propelled C++ to popularity is that it began as a superset of C and it still mostly is... but that is incompatible with Rust's goals, which center around sacrificing some of the power and expressiveness of C and C++ in order to allow the compiler to rule out entire classes of bugs. (Unless you leave broken invariants at the end of unsafe blocks you write, of course.)

The big strength of Rust is that it gives you safety guarantees which meet or exceed managed languages while still being competitive with C/C++ performance-wise and providing a runtime minimal enough that it can take C/C++'s place when you need to write an extension to a program written in another language. I know of no other language that combines those properties without some other major flaw.

it goes right down to distinctions as simple as C++ having a "const" keyword for function arguments, while Rust has a "mut" keyword for function arguments, which helps to encourage const-correctness in Rust... something C++ has a problem with due to things like slipping deadlines.

[L_A_G]

Hilarious. This basically sums up your mentality: I feel marginalized by Rust -- it is hurting my C++ feelings -- waa waa boo hoo. If you think the Rust community is obnoxious, it's merely because your obnoxious attitude is backfiring on you.

Doing a lot of projecting are we? Because it's kind of hard to feel marginalized by something which is marginal in itself.

By definition, C++ can't take on Rust's core strengths without ceasing to be C++.

The big strength that propelled C++ to popularity is that it began as a superset of C and it still mostly is... but that is incompatible with Rust's goals, which center around sacrificing some of the power and expressiveness of C and C++ in order to allow the compiler to rule out entire classes of bugs. (Unless you leave broken invariants at the end of unsafe blocks you write, of course.)

The big strength of Rust is that it gives you safety guarantees which meet or exceed managed languages while still being competitive with C/C++ performance-wise and providing a runtime minimal enough that it can take C/C++'s place when you need to write an extension to a program written in another language. I know of no other language that combines those properties without some other major flaw.

it goes right down to distinctions as simple as C++ having a "const" keyword for function arguments, while Rust has a "mut" keyword for function arguments, which helps to encourage const-correctness in Rust... something C++ has a problem with due to things like slipping deadlines.

One of the big initial selling points of Rust was that it had robust multithreading features built straight into the language, something C++ sorely lacked at the time. Because of this you could write platform independent high performance applications fairly easily, with C++ introducing built-in multithreading the performance benefit went away.

With modern day implementations of interpreted languages like Java, JavaScript and Python that run about as fast as Rust when properly utilized there really aren't much in terms of benefits of using Rust. Even the ease of embedding extensions from other languages is kind of irrelevant when the extensions used by C/C++ programmers are mostly written in C/C++ themselves. I'd compare the ease of using modules from other languages to having two spare tires on a car. Great if you blow two tires at once, but barely anyone ever does that.

[edgar444]

Apart from not obeying usual text-editing conventions. The insertion point is supposed to go between characters (or before the first character, or after the last character); it is not on a character.

You fool! Just press `a`

[ldo17]

Just press `a`

What about “i”?

Why does vim need two different commands to enter insert mode?

[edgar444]

What about “i”?

Why does vim need two different commands to enter insert mode?

Because the alternative is pressing 2 buttons, is that what you want? well you can do that too `a` then `ctrl+o` then `h`, or `a` then `left arrow key`, or just `ha`, but why?! instead do `i`!

[ldo17]

Because the alternative is pressing 2 buttons, is that what you want?

I can do it in Emacs (or most other editors) without having to press even one button first.

[edgar444]

I can do it in Emacs (or most other editors) without having to press even one button first.

You can move in text editor without pressing a single button on keyboard? Are you implying mind control, which obviously is a ridiculous! Oh and mouse is cheating!

To move before or after a character you got to do something!