[Info-vax] Lisp alternatives for Emacs [was Re: Python for x86?]

[hb@end.of.inter.net]

On Sunday, April 23, 2023 at 1:31:32 AM UTC+2, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> My point was that if someone took the 28.2 source and 
> put back all the #ifdef vms code from 21.2 then what would 
> be missing? How much of the new stuff added would require 
> new #ifdef vms code? 
> 
> I don't think I have played with GNU Emacs since VMS VAX 
> days (early 90's) and I have no idea about what has been added 
> to GNU Emacs the last few decades, but I am sort of guessing 
> that the new stuff would be most "edit stuff" and not 
> so much "system interface stuff". Of course I could 
> be totally wrong. 

The sources on the freeware cd are said to be based on Emacs 21.2. The files in the EMACS21_2.ZIP archive are a snapshot of a development environment. I could not find these changes in the Emacs sources and could not find the Emacs sources on which this development environment is based. But that may be my fault not trying harder. There may be changes in Emacs which make the known VMS code obsolete or require new VMS specific code. It seems a lot of work to get VMS support back into the current Emacs sources. How many users are there which want/need a current version of Emacs?

Using that development environment it's possible to build Emacs for x86. (The IA64 additions in EMACS21_2_IVMS.ZIP can be ignored; they deal with IA64 specifics especially with Short Data.) I did that some time ago. There were minor run-time problems. At that time it was not obvious what caused them: a build problem with the cross tools environment, exception handling, ...? I should try a(nother) native build.

I used MMK for the builds. A few steps to build Emacs are better done on the target platform. MMK for x86 needed a couple of changes. I didn't put them back to https://github.com/endlesssoftware/mmk. But I just noticed a pull request, which probably describes similar changes to build MMK for x86.