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

[Akira Kyle]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 01:07 PM, Stefan Monnier 
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> > To my knowledge, mpv is probably the neetiest one to bring in 
> > media
> > playing capabilities; it has lots of codecs, is written to be 
> > embedded,
> > is free and would make Emacs be able to play music and video 
> > files
> > without external players. Adding multimedia capabilities opens 
> > up for
> > lots of flexibility and creativity; people can maybe do 
> > interesting
> > stuff with it. I would certainly like Emacs to become a 
> > multimedia
> > player,
>
> The question is what benefit is there to having it linked in as
> a library as opposed to accessing similar functionality via
> a sub-process.

I don't think this necessarily has to be a question of Emacs links 
against yet another library, or someone wraps a program's command 
line arguments. As I'm hoping to show with `emacs-webkit`, it's 
viable to think about using dynamic modules which link against a 
library and provide the desired functionality. Then those who 
never want that functionality never have to worry about their 
Emacs being linked with it, while the lisp package providing the 
functionality is free to use the best interface to that library, 
which I often think will be through linking to it. Linking often 
provides better performance and less complexity as you avoid 
needing to constantly define a data exchange format and parse it.

I once saw someone arguing why "the Emacs way" was far superior 
"the unix way" mainly because unix insists on everything being 
thought of as just files and text, which while powerful, ends up 
with every program defining different, incompatible text 
interfaces and parsing formats. Case in point being how messy 
command line argument formats can be since there's no standard 
format imposed on the way a program should handle flags. Meanwhile 
with Emacs everything is a Sexpr, which along with being easier to 
manipulate, offers just enough structure to greatly reduce these 
kind of incompatibilities between programs trying to communicate 
with eachother.