Isn’t this just vscode?
I would love to modernize the emacs core, but rewrites are usually destined to fail, more likely the older the project being rewritten is. And emacs is very old.
How about this approach. Emacs only got dynamic modules in v26, fivish years ago? All the junk compiled into the core was done so because there wasn’t something like dynamic modules. Someone (I hope I’m not signing myself up for this) should do a project to move all functionality other than the lisp engine itself and maybe some basic primitives out into dynamic modules. When the lisp engine is isolated via a stable abi, then you can redesign it without fear. Similarly with any of the modules themselves.
Unlikely to happen. From what I remember, even newer things (treesitter) aren’t loaded as modules but are instead compiled into the core.
Is this still being developed? I remember there was some excitement with it early on but haven’t heard much since. Looking at the readme, it seems a bunch of its features (and value adds) are no longer maintained or just straight up don’t work anymore. Seems like there just weren’t enough javascript developers interested in Emacs to help this project continue.
I think the excitement was from an other (now defunct) project called REmacs, one of it’s main goals was replacing the C Core with Rust. Emacs Lisp is old and has its problems, but I prefer it over JS/TS as extending language for Emacs.
I recently had cause to try to load some code into a JavaScript repl from a typescript project. Man what a nightmare.
The js ecosystem is very difficult to work with. Many options and browser issues are intertwined. Clever ideas abound… but that might be part of the issue.
JavaScript wouldn’t be an improvement over elisp imo. The theory is that a more accessible language would bring users, but many devs aren’t interested in anything but getting the job done with vs code and then going home.
And honestly the ridiculous quickness in which things get deprecated despite no replacement is a bad developer mindset.
Out of curiosity I installed the .debs. They appear to have been empty as a ‘dpkg -L’ only shows two directories under /usr/local.
I see recent commits but it appears as though the builds are broken at the least.