Re: Motif support

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2021 13:05:23 +0100
> 
> I worked on some code bases much larger than Emacs' C part,
> with an application domain much more technical and specialized, and
> achieved productivity on non-trivial tasks after a few hours of study.
> Those are projects that put a lot of thought on code architecture, both
> macro and micro, with no tolerance for long-lived hacks or "somehow this
> seems to work" changes.

Either those projects were redesigned and rewritten every few years,
or they stopped getting significant changes after several years.

Emacs has its major part rewritten only very rarely (the display
engine in Emacs 21 and the handling of non-ASCII in Emacs 20 and then
again in Emacs 23 are basically the only examples that come to mind).
Emacs is also a highly interactive program with many extensions "in
the wild", so it must stay compatible throughout the changes.  And
finally, I very much doubt that any other project supports so many
different UI frameworks.

These differences explain why you don't frequently see the complexity
we have in Emacs.

And please don't take this as a defense of what we have, it's just a
statement of some facts we should keep in mind.