[FR-devel] Just joining

[Yohanes Santoso]

Hi all,

As the customary for a new member, I'd like to introduce myself. I
live in Seattle, working daytime as a programmer. My daytime job
requires me to use Java, elisp and ksh (korn shell for those from win
background). I myself have been in the computer industry for only 5
years. I'm versed (or used to be) in ML, Prolog, Perl, C and C++ (plus
those above). My ruby day started around 6 months ago.

My main motive in joining this team is to create an remacs. As some of
you may notice, I am the person who asked about existance of emacs in
ruby language in ruby-talk.

I feel that emacs is starting to get old with its single-threadedness
and its difficulty in incorporating external widget.

I use emacs for almost everything. I read mail, news, do calendaring,
and everyday stuff from emacs except web browsing. However, it has not
been as enjoyable as it was. I started to notice some shortcomings:
downloading mail would cause the whole process to hung, and I have to
go to a web browser to open a url.

gnus probably is to blame for causing the whole emacs to
hung. However, modifying gnus so that it performs async i/o is
counter productive because the problem is not in gnus. The problem
lies in emacs inability to do threading.

Currently w3 is the emacs' web browser. It is so oh primitive compared
to other browsers. I think the w3 team is misguided in implementing
that. It is an unnecessary work as they could have embedded the gecko
or netscape browser (w3 started before gecko, but after the
NN4). However, due to the difficulty in embedding external widget
within emacs, the w3 team decided to implement a new browser. This is
sad because the single-threadedness of emacs cause the w3 browser to
be unusable for daily basis.

I asked around in both emacs and xemacs groups for multi-threaded
support and a better way to embed external widget. The answers I have
been getting ranges from 'no way' to 'impossible' because making emacs
multi-threaded will likely break many existing libraries.

Then I came across freeride. Take a look at the doc, see the current
cvs, and I think the idea of using bus in place of emacs buffer is
nice and cleaner too.

I hope by the time rubyride is ready for release, there is already a
lisp->ruby converter so that all those rich libraries from emacs are
not wasted.

Does my motive run against Curt's and Rich's vision? If not then where
do I start?

YS.