2017-04-13 Emacs meeting at skills matter
DISCLAIMER
These notes are the noter-taker’s interpretation of the interesting information in the talks.
The order of the material is not maintained, and some content is omitted. These notes were taken quite quickly so their may be factual errors
Additional interpretation of the material has been added and though some of this is marked as such, other interpretations likely are not.
I would like to thank the authors for their talks.
Interesting things
There is (apparently) a London emacs users mailing list
clj-refactor 2017-04-13
Author had quiet complete notes in org mode format
Clojure is yet another lisp
Interpretation: Themes
Some anthropology on open source
Rewrites
Open source in general
The clojure ecosystem in emacs
Trivia
Lots of writing on slides because they are both notes and a presentation
Companies structure often coincide with open source projects
Emacs clojure ecosystem
clojure mode
inf-clojure
Minimal REPL
cider
Supports intelligent code jumping (and more)
RPC model (similar to jedi)
“Meeko”
flycheck-clojure
Linting
Philosophical content
The value of refactorings
Refactorings define scope of project
Constraints within which to be creative
Interpretation: See Vi Harts 12 tone composition video
Trade offs of open source development
Expert people
Limited interaction: compared to business
Who are your users
What do they care about?
Interpretation: Is this actually different from companies (with the exception of SAAS spying)
Bleeding edge
Some problems are harder in open source land
Good place to learn skills (e.g. git)
Life cycle of a pull request
“Pull requests welcome”
“Pull requests not welcome - risk of regression”
Meta: how to even reason about this
Interpretation: Minimalism / orthogonality neatness concerns in open source land
Is this a unique problem?
Interpretation: Young languages tend to splurge a bit (“here is everything I’ve written in one useful package”)“guess I get a bit defensive”
Your users don’t necessarily even think that they are users
Supply chain
Demanding users
Function rename caused regression in spacemacs
This is the standard interface issue, but I imagine this is more of an issue in emacs because of the lack of function hiding
Some conversations about testing
Thought: Unit testing would not have caught this, this is between projects
c.f contract testingInteresting points
How do you correctly reason about “risk of changes causing regression”?
Three levels of language features in emacs
Emacs level
Language aware
Need RPC
AST aware
Non performant
Extensive use of “:” in namespacing
AST parsing performance is an issue
Simpler AST parsers seem to exist in clojure ecosystem
analogous to pylint versus pyflakes
Links
Meeko
Rpc protocol in clojure
Slime
Gazer
Indirection layer for talking to different schemes (?)
Remacs 2017-04-13
Porting emacs to rust
Trivia
“Project objectives high-level overview talk”
Lots of people here are from finance-land
This might reflect the location of this talk
Everyone is using emacs for their slides presentations…
Links
www.wilfred.me.uk
@_wilfredh
EVM
Python Tox for emacs (remacs is on evm)
Analogous to neovim
The innards of emacs
TEMACS
The internal emacs lisp interpreter
What is the code?
More than 70% of the code is in lisp
Most of the rest of C
Lots of ported libraries
Standard “here are a bunch of general case libraries in C pattern”
20kloc of Makefile(!)
Unexec
Memory map of entire emacs image
Breaks malloc
(lol) Was forcing glibc to maintain legacy code for a while
Alternative implementation Idea
Binary representations of different types of things rather than a memory map
Idea generalize caching of state after load
At the moment a memory map of emacs without your packages is created. If this could be generalized then the load times of your packages could be made faster.
Remacs goals
Maintains emacs lisp
Reimplements things in core
Maintain performance
What remacs is not
Hostile fork
Author has commit rights in emacs core
(Aggressive) Redesign
Justification for goals
The code is old (First vcs commit in 1985)
Lots of workarounds
Inconsistent code
Indentation style is different
Interpretation: Force emacs to use github….
Rust has a good kitchen sink that we can use
Exception handing in rust
Multithreading
rust is thread safe
Prior forks
Interpretation: i.e. we aren’t evil
Guile emacs
XEmacs
Questions
Interpretation: At what stage does the fork become hostile :)
Either it’s slightly hostile or unused