Re: Motif support

[Arthur Miller]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
>> Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2021 21:24:52 +0100
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> >> >> Games usually do all GUI drawing themselves.
>> >> > So you are saying that so should we??
>> >> 
>> >> Believe it or not, Emacs is much more reminiscent of a game engine than
>> >> a desktop app.
>> >
>> > I indeed don't believe it.
>> 
>> I agree with the OP. Emacs does a lot of micro-management of graphical
>> elements and does its own event processing. That's distinctive of games.
>
> There's a large chasm between "micro-management of graphical elements
> and own event processing" and doing all the GUI by hand, bit by bit.
> It is far from being black-and-white.  And Emacs is very far from the
> edge you seem to be saying we are at or near.  You are invited to read
> the code and see for yourself.

In a way a repl is kind of similar to a game loop in that it reads input (read),
update the world (eval) and render the world (print). The other similarity is
that Emacs is also controlling it's loop rather than fitting into some
frameworks loop such as Gtk, or some other toolkits framework. You rather use
those as a library of functionality to draw things when they suit Emacs, while
desktop applications would usually fit into a framework and let toolkit do the
update and drawing when it needs to be done. GUI toolkits like Gtk are usually
"don't call us, we call you", while games, and I perecive Emacs, are rather, "do
this for me when I ask you".

Maybe I missunderstand how Emacs works, but that is how I understood it.