Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès)
> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 14:03:39 +0200
> 
> David Kastrup <address@hidden> skribis:
> 
> > This needs an overhaul of GUILE's string handling (which delegates parts
> > of it to helper libraries, some of those being under control of GNU,
> > some not).
> 
> String handling is partly delegated to GNU libunistring.  There’s no
> other library involved.

Yes, but libunistring is not a good basis for Emacs's i18n features,
because it relies on the underlying C library for most of its
features.  That doesn't allow writing programs that behave exactly the
same on any platform, something that Emacs must support.  It also is
too locale-dependent, which is a Bad Thing on platforms which don't
have the glibc new-locale feature (and is IMO inelegant in use even on
glibc platforms).

Another minor point is that Guile still doesn't allow to control the
EOL format of text I/O independently of binary I/O mode, again
something that Emacs must (and does) have.