Re: Introducing emacs-webkit and more thoughts on Emacs rendering (was Rethinking the design of xwidgets)

[Alexander Adolf]

A very personal caution with respect to webkitgtk2 on macOS.

We are using webkitgtk in another OSS project, and building it in macOS
is a huge pain. You have to patch it (and devise new patches when a new
version is released), and compiling it takes hours (literally). When a
new webkitgtk version comes out, the pain starts all over again. This
has gotten to the point that currently there is no macOS build of that
OSS project.

And on top you have a webkit implementation readily available on the
macOS platform. Hence, we are actively seeking to either replace
webkitgtk with something that works cross-platform, or - in case there
isn't any such beast - to write a GTK-style wrapper for the macOS
webkit.

Thus, my very personal take would be that making webkitgtk a requirement
is probably not a promising approach if macOS is to remain on the list
of supported operating systems of this package (assuming that it would
end up being a package, of course).


Looking forward to your thoughts,

  --alexander