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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Emacs' display engine, input handling, etc., are written in C.

So what? There’s no reason the Atom team couldn’t optimise their critical paths while retaining extensibility and cross-platform-ness, and the proof is that Emacs has already done it.

Their problem is not technical, it’s ideological

That would impair the stated goal of "hackability."

Emacs and vim are perhaps the most configurable and extensible editors/IDEs in existence. Fast doesn't mean unhackable.

If you read the post, that is mostly the work that they're describing.

> There’s no reason the Atom team couldn’t optimize their critical paths while retaining extensibility and cross-platform-ness, and the proof is that Emacs has already done it.

I believe that's what the Atom team is doing. They've detailed several critical paths that can and will be rewritten in C++/Rust in the linked post.

Your point?

Write slow javascript, get slow programs. It's not a crazy concept.

Edit: typo

Emacs is written in Elisp which is a dynamic language just like JavaScript

emacs core is written in C. All of your extensions are mostly in elisp. A few run servers and talk to them though. (Eg ensime)

> Emacs is written in Elisp which is a dynamic language just like JavaScript

All dynamic languages are not born equal when it comes to performance. 2 implementations of the same language aren't even equal. While V8 is a fast JS engine, the DOM isn't. Emacs doesn't rely on the DOM unlike Atom or VSCode.

And Electron’s are written in C++, so I’m unsure what your point is.

Yes and no. E.g. Atom does its line layout and rendering in Javascript, which manipulates the DOM, and Electron then renders things using C++ code: http://blog.atom.io/2017/06/22/a-new-approach-to-text-render....

Emacs' display loop is tens of thousands of lines of C that directly calls the native text-rendering API: https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo....

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