Benevolent Dictatorship

[Kragen]

On Fri, 20 Mar 1998, Rainer Joswig wrote:
> I'd rather not like to write unportable code
> (Well, sometimes, ...). So if there is a new CL-based
> Emacs for example, I want it portable. 

Emacs is definitely worth thinking about:

- It's certainly the most-widely-used Lisp VM
- the elisp reference manual claims that there are only minor differences
	between elisp and CL, consisting mostly of CL features that don't
	exist in elisp (notably, there is no CLOS at all), but I am not
	in a position to evaluate this
- there are several large applications written in it -- the "IDE", of course,
	several mailreaders and newsreaders, a Web browser, etc.  These are
	more widely used than any other large Lisp applications in the
	world, and are accordingly succumbing to feature creep.

It obviously needs some work: threads and CLOS are a minimum.  JIT is probably
a priority.  These are big jobs.  CMU CL already has them, right?  (I haven't
used CMU CL.)

Kragen