by rollcat on 11/17/23, 1:07 PM
The main advantage Emacs has over other, more modern IDEs is ELisp, and the vast ecosystem built around it. I don't see how supplementing ELisp with JS would make Emacs more attractive; most of Emacs' shortcomings originate elsewhere: single-threaded core, IO-blocks-UI, ELisp defaulting to dynamic scoping, bad defaults in general, poor OS/GUI integration, antiquated nomenclature, and just the sheer number of third-party packages and config tweaking that it takes to bring features that should work out of the box (sane dired, LSP, (ma)git, tabs, etc).
Emacs desperately needs to deal with its tech debt, but adding a new language runtime without addressing the mountain of architectural issues is just circling around the problem, without actually even looking at it. Hats off for the effort but I'll pass.
by DDSDev on 11/17/23, 5:22 PM
I am the main author behind the JS/TS integration for emacs-ng. I still think it is one of the cooler things I have done that people have taken note of.
I am a game programmer by trade, and I had experiencing embedding JS into projects from a previous engine I worked on where JS was the primary gaming scripting layer.
I love emacs and I love lisp in general - I added JS to emacs mainly to find out if I could do it. I also had a hope that adding JS could expand emacs usage to people that don't know elisp, and have JS be a "gateway" into elisp.
I think that the JS integration is a huge testament to the flexibility and quality of emacs and elisp.
As I have gotten older, I've had less and less time for open source, but I don't consider this project abandoned. I still want to upgrade us to the latest deno. My previous upgrade attempt (which you can see in draft PR at the time of this comment) was a little too ambitious - I tried to move us to a more multithreaded approach, but I think I need to work on this more incrementally.
by JNRowe on 11/17/23, 10:58 AM
This was discussed a couple of years ago with lots of comments¹. I'm unsure how much has changed in the meantime, as the top couple of pages of commits on GH are upstream emacs changes. Would make me happy to see it progressing though, as(like with neovim) the tugs in different directions allows things to be tested out that might not make it past the original mail to a developer list in the upstream projects.
Edit: I decided to have a quick poke around, and there are ~40 non-upstream commits this year. About half of those are minor cleanups and cargo dependency updates.
¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26453174
by coldacid on 11/17/23, 2:47 PM
One of the great things about Emacs is that I can run it on a terminal when needs be, or as a GUI application when I have a graphical environment up and running. Doing something like rebasing it on WebRender means I wouldn't be able to use it in the terminal anymore.
There are plenty of problems in Emacs that need to be resolved, but this is NOT one of them.
by cloudhan on 11/17/23, 3:36 PM
by sakesun on 11/17/23, 12:38 PM
Typescript with Web render engine ?
Why not just build VSCode extensions ?
by paddy_m on 11/17/23, 2:20 PM
I'm glad to see ambitious development being done on the core emacs platform. Could you include some images of what is possible with webrender in the README and the introduction to your docs page. I think it will help others get excited about what you're building.
by _hl_ on 11/17/23, 5:32 PM
I’ve always wanted to start building something much like this, but the sheer scale of the task put me off.
I tip my hat and then some to the fine folks rolling this stone up the mountain. And that’s coming from someone who is married to elisp.
by smegsicle on 11/17/23, 4:33 PM
pretty sure the -ng suffix is for a rewrite after the original is abandoned, not taking something that's still developed and slapping on random web tech
by netzego on 11/17/23, 10:50 AM
probably one should start with implementing systemd in GNU/Emacs..
by 3836293648 on 11/17/23, 5:44 PM
Does webrender actually help yet or does it still bring everything to a crawl when transparency gets involved?
The other unfortunate part of this is that it's based on the gtk branch, which breaks certain input chains that I personally rely on
by layer8 on 11/17/23, 5:06 PM
JavaScript is like the hammer that makes every problem look like a nail.
by dmm on 11/17/23, 10:51 AM
> Webrender
Would this allow emacs to be used as a web application?
by rullopat on 11/17/23, 10:55 AM
Electron for Emacs?
by exxos on 11/17/23, 6:45 PM
Why not Bun ?
by v3ss0n on 11/17/23, 11:39 AM
Emacs becoming an OS is not a meme anymore with this. Now EMacs becoming a Starship.