Re: Replacing all C code????

[Fangrui Song]

On 2020-01-05, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > Rewriting all the C code of Emacs in some other language would be a
> > tremendous job.
>
> But one that can be "embarassingly parallel" and that doesn't require
> necessarily much design work, so it's not terribly hard, many people are
> able to participate.
> It might not make Emacs better, so it might be harder to motivate people,
> but the REmacs experience seems to suggest that it could work.
>
> > If execution of the other language is slower, the slowdown could make
> > Emacs unusable on old machines.  Old machines such as the T200 and
> > T400 are very important for our freedom since we can run them with
> > Libreboot.  We must not downgrade support for them.
>
> My main machines run on Core 2 Duos, so I definitely care about those
> "old" machines,

I want to contribute data points from other GNU projects that Emacs may
learn from.

GCC moved to C++ [1][2].
gdb moved from C90 to C++ [3]. The filenames are still *.c, but 
binutils-gdb/gdb/.dir-locals.el contains:

  (c-mode . ((c-file-style . "GNU")
              (mode . c++)

These processes also motivated people to find obsoleted code (probably
while doing "embarassingly parallel" work).


[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/542457/
[2]: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/gcc-in-cxx
[3]: https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/cxx-conversion