Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[David Kastrup]

Juanma Barranquero <address@hidden> writes:

> On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 6:53 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> We don't want Emacs to become more useful to the detriment of GCC.
>> Of course, this is the Emacs developer list so it is to be expected
>> that some list members are less than enthused about the principle
>> underlying this kind of decision.  But not taking the underlying
>> principle into account when dissenting means that the dissent is only
>> relevant to a part of the decisionmaking, and the decisionmaking is
>> exactly about finding a _balance_.
>
> FWIW, I'm not arguing against your position. I just happen to think
> that, in this matter, decision making is hardly fact-based, because
> facts are scarce. It's much more about how one side and the other see
> the consequences of these decisions. I happen to be in the less
> pessimist side, but that's just a gut feeling, entirely fact-free.

I am not necessarily describing my own position here.  I'm feeling
somewhat ambiguous about the best course forward, but I agree with the
position of Richard in as far that I would consider it a shame if Emacs
had to rely on LLVM to provide a useful environment for writing code to
be compiled with GCC.  Even taking the question of policy aside, one
wants things like completion to work properly with all GNU extensions to
the various languages GCC supports.  GNU extensions are basically dead
in the water if Emacs refuses dealing with them because its modes are
based on working with LLVM.

Richard's position as far as I understand is not "we don't want
compiler-supported completion in Emacs" but rather "we don't want
completion in Emacs that is only supported by using LLVM".  Whether or
not one wants to consider relying on LLVM bad politically, it means that
Emacs will be constrained to support only languages and language
dialects at the choice of LLVM developers.

At any rate, given the nature of this decision, any attempt to change it
would have to be based on bringing previously unconsidered facts to the
attention of Richard.  "I come to a different conclusion based on the
same information" is not going to help.

-- 
David Kastrup