Re: About implementing libre.js/el in Emacs

[Tim Cross]

OK, I don't see one as being worse than the other. They are different and have different benefits/drawbacks. 

WRT developing plugins in elisp, I wonder if using the Google Closure Compiler (Apache 2.0 License) could be useful. This is what Clojurescript does, allowing you to develop in Clojure Lisp and the output being optimised JS code. However, not sure how much demand there would be for writing browser (or node) extensions in elisp. While it is nice to write in lisp to develop JS, Clojurescript has already provided that wheel and it is quite mature. 

On Sun, 30 Aug 2020 at 12:45, Qiantan Hong <qhong@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Aug 29, 2020, at 10:26 PM, Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Just curious - in what ways is JS worse then Elisp?
There’re lots of other arguments, e.g. homoiconicity, typing (js does lots of
unreasonable type casts)… but in this context, I think the most important
point is that Emacs and Emacs Lisp give one of the most flexible and
self-descriptive programming system. If something is implemented in
Emacs lisp, we get M-x apropos, describe-function, describe-variable,
they can be overrode by just eval-defun, and can be advised. Customizing
or extending it is painless and trivial. However, those things become
much harder if the package is implemented in JS.

> I agree Option 1 would give more bang for your buck - at least initially.
>
I’ll take that. I imagine while implementing Web Extensions API for js
it will be trivial to also bring those to Elisp too, so finally we not only
have those JS browser plugins to run but can also develop plugins
in Elisp.

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regards,

Tim

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Tim Cross