Re: Motif support

[Aiko Kyle]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2021 at 8:11 AM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> > > Emacs has its major part rewritten only very rarely (the display
> > > engine in Emacs 21 and the handling of non-ASCII in Emacs 20 and then
> > > again in Emacs 23 are basically the only examples that come to mind).
> > > Emacs is also a highly interactive program with many extensions "in
> > > the wild", so it must stay compatible throughout the changes.  And
> > > finally, I very much doubt that any other project supports so many
> > > different UI frameworks.
> >
> > AFAIK a lot of the complexity on the display engine comes from
> > shoehorning a GUI on top of a TUI design.
>
> That's a myth that doesn't endure meeting with the reality.  Just read
> the code.  If anything, the Emacs 21 display engine is the other way
> around: TTY display built on top of the GUI display.

It seems we just passed the 20th anniversary of the release of Emacs
21! Since then, I think a lot of assumptions about hardware have
changed or are changing: GPUs are now ubiquitous, hidpi is here to
stay, laptops have precision multitouch trackpads and touch displays,
the end of Dennard scaling and subsequent move towards parallel
processing for performance gains. I often wonder what emacs "core"
would look like if it were rewritten from scratch today with an
emphasis on performance. I imagine Firefox's transition of gecko to
rust components from servo over the last several years is probably a
good indication of what such a rewrite looks like for a complex
codebase.