A week ago, I wrote about the recent restoration of the Guile Emacs project. Despite my enthusiasm for the original project, I just couldn’t get excited about its resurrection. You can take a look at that post for my reasons why.
To be clear, I believe that if Emacs were being written today, Guile would be the natural choice and a great one. But that ship has long since sailed. Emacs is 40 years old and there are plenty of technical and political reasons arguing against trying to retrofit it now.
Still, it’s an interesting project. If you’d like to know about more about it, LWN has a nice summary of the project and the talk that its leader, Robin Templeton, gave at this year’s EmacsConf. The article lays out the rationale for the project as well as some of the problems—technical and political that it’s apt to encounter.The project is actually pretty far along but there are still performance and other problems to resolve. There’s also the issue of whether the basically conservative user base would accept such a change. As hard as it is to believe, not everyone is as fond as Scheme as some of us and others just hate change, especially in something as essential as their editor.