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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

After 39 years of EMACS maintenance, having over 3000 bugs is embarrassing.

I'm not really sure how to reply to this.

The first thing that's worth mentioning is that Emacs isn't simply in "maintenance" mode. There is a nice steady flow of new features, significant features too such as Elisp native compilation and Wayland support.

It's also important to keep in mind the sheer scale of Emacs. Vanilla Emacs ships over 1 million lines of Elisp (I'm getting 1.3m according to a small shell script). Considering just how massive of a scale this is, 3000 bugs is really not so bad.

Yea, that’s 3,000 open bug reports, but there are probably at least 10,000 unreported bugs in obscure modes. The really obscure ones are the most likely to be both half–finished and not used very much.

Like that says anything about anything?

github.com/apple/swift has ~4000 open issues labeled as "bug" and has existed since 8 years ago. That makes about ~500 "bugs" per year while emacs by the same measure then have about ~75 bugs per year.

Tell me again how awful that metric is compared to others?

I'd say that Swift's 4000 issues are significantly more embarrassing given that it's developed by the most valuable tech company in the world.

Besides what other commenters mentioned, Emacs is basically a mini operating system including, besides a text editor, terminal and shell, file manager, diff and merge tool, calculator, mail/news/RSS reader, calendar, diary, IRC client, debugger, sophisticated help system, and others.

All big programs have bugs, it has over 3000 because people actually use it and it has a healthy community that can report them. 3000 bugs reported is value.

After 39 years of EMACS maintenance, having ONLY 3000 bugs is AMAZING.

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FTFY: most commercial software projects get 3,000 bugs in 3-5 years (if they're successful and grow), and you quickly need a serious database (e.g. jira) to curate them. It's not a morale issue because there's product manager(s) who manage this herd, not eng, and there's no expectation of zero defects because the goal is to win marketshare, which is far removed from any individual bug.

It is not like there haven’t been any new features added or refactors done in 39 years… There’s an opportunity cost to fixing bugs rather than adding new capabilities or improving the code base for easier extension. Not all bugs warrant squashing.

It is an open source project, if you are really that embarrassed about the bugs you can look into submitting patches. Most likely if people have been using the program for 39 years, these bugs are not show-stoppers.

Just wait until you see how many bugs VS Code has!

I love VS Code, but I occasionally wonder;

should we be amazed over its resilience or in awe that it actually works?

I can't decide.

also, every time I think about the amount of CPU cycles that has to be executed just for the first pixel to appear on the screen, just, wow. what a time to be alive!

People used to think that Emacs was bloated. Like:

'Eight Megabytes (of RAM) And Constantly Swapping', back when 8 MiB was big.

That was back when 8MB was not just big, but so huge that your University’s Computer Science department couldn’t afford it.

~half of that

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3A...

but we all know number of bugs reported is not a very useful metric (dups, weird non reproducible configurations, not confirmed bugs, etc...)

besides: VS Code team is very good, we should hope that every software project was developed the same way.

The amazing thing about that repo is not the amount of open bugs (1700) but the amount of closed ones (24k).

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