Re: Development Speed

[Óscar Fuentes]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>   > I cannot see the future or what could've been, this is highly opinionated
>   > but I do believe following latest C standard as early as possible is good
>   > for an ...
>
> As has been pointed out, we support lots of platforms, including old
> platforms, and some of them don't have fresh new compilers.  If we
> wanted to be quick to tell users "tough, your platform is no longer
> supported," we could assume everyone has the latest GCC to use.

This is not about having the latest GCC, this is about having a GCC
that's less than 10 years old.

> But those platforms are important.
>
> Some of those old platforms are among the most important ones
> because they allow operation without the Intel Management Engine
> (or AMD's counterpart to that).

Aren't there modern machines without this? Machines that are much more
performant, reliable and secure than those old ones, which usually are
tied to an unsupported OS full of security defects?

I sincerely don't get the stance of clinging to decades-old software and
hardware but when it comes to Emacs it must be the latest and shiniest.
As if emacs version N would cease to work the very moment emacs version
N+1 is released.

Have we checked lately if those machines that we purport to support are
able to run anything more complex than `emacs -Q'?

> Our principles say we must do our best to encourage people to use a
> free compiler if that is at all possible.  If the only C17 compiler
> for a platform is nonfree, we must support using GCC instead.

Nobody suggested using anything else than GCC.

I'm having the feeling that a good chunk of participants on this ml are
unwittingly but firmly commited to confine Emacs to the same
retro-computing world they live in.

The amount of tension and obstructionism that emerges every time that
someone suggests implementing some technology less than 20 years old is
overwhelming.