[erlang-questions] erlang for programming a text editor

[Mats]

I think it's a good idea. I want to upgrade my editor while coding. I also
want my editor to be distributed so I don't lose state when I restart my
computer. A wonderful thought. Updating the source could be done 2-3 times a
day. Update cycles never seen before with text editors. Bye bye Emacs. ;)

Luke Gorrie made an emacs clone[1]. It could be a good start.
The only part missing in Ermacs is LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang).

Think about the accumulated runtime of all users, if Ermacs was running 24/7
of the latest Erlang release. It could be a nice way of introducing "Test
what you fly, fly what you test" to the QA routine (both for Ermacs and
Erlang).

[1] http://fresh.homeunix.net/~luke/ermacs/



On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 6:31 AM, Ted Henry <tedhenry10@REDACTED> wrote:

> With 100 core chips probably coming to desktop computers in the near
> future,
> I wonder about writing a multiprocess vi-like or emacs-like text editor
> (probably more emacs-like in implementation.) Sometimes single threaded
> editors really bog down when searching multiple files, syntax highlighting
> multiple files. I'm not that knowledgeable in the Erlang world. It seems
> like Erlang's fault tolerance and ability to upgrade code without
> restarting
> would not be big advantages for a text editor. Also a text editor isn't
> usually distributed across multiple physical machines. I think the main
> advantage would be Erlang's processes for concurrency. Would Erlang offer a
> good advantage over a programming language with software transactional
> memory (e.g. Haskell, Clojure)? Would *you* use Erlang to program a text
> editor or desktop application?
>
> Very interested to read your thoughts.
>
> Ted
>