WEBVTT
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Hello EmacsConf! This is John Wiegley, I'm
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one of the co-maintainers of Emacs along
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with Eli Zaretskii
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and Lars Ingebrigtsen, and I wanted to
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give you
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a technical update on what has been
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happening
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with the Emacs in the last year.
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So, specifically we have a few notes that
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I've gotten from
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a call with Eli, he's been in charge of
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directing most of the
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technical contributions on the mailing
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list and monitoring all the patches.
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So, I'm more here just as a messenger.
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He says that we have good progress and
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support for Cairo,
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this is going to be enabled by default
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in Emacs 28,
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and Cairo plus HarfBuzz is going to be
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the preferred rendering combination.
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So, Cairo support is not new, but in the
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past there were a lot of bugs in the
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code, and so it was made experimental.
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Most of those bugs have been fixed
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recently, and now it becomes the default
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in the next major version,
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which will enable several good features
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such as color emojis, if you're looking
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forward to those.
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Xft, as a result is deprecated. There are
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bugs not getting fixed in that code, it
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doesn't appear to be very well
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maintained.
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It was the most advanced font backend
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in Emacs before Cairo became dependable.
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So, now that we have a more a better
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maintained and available solution in
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Cairo, we're going to go from that,
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go from Xft to that.
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Native compilation in Lisp
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will also be landing soon. It's currently
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on a branch, but there are several people
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using it,
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they say, they're very impressed. It does
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require live GCC
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JIT to be installed for it to work, and
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this means you have to have GCC 10
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installed.
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Execution of Emacs Lisp with native
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compilation on
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is about 2.5 times faster than the
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bytecode
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interpreter, we don't yet have any
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measurements on
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memory or how it affects resources
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besides CPU, so,
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we do look forward to having more
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numbers and analysis to see what the
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real impact of that is going to be,
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also, it may vary in compute advantage
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based on the type of workload that
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you're performing.
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A downside to the native compilation at
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the moment is that, it takes a long
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time to compile even when you're doing a
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16 core build of Emacs,
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it can still take 15 minutes to compile
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Emacs
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and all of its Lisp code
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with this enabled.
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Also, this is going to have to happen on
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every user's machine
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because we cannot distribute the native
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compilation products, they are specific
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to the processor that you might be
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running on.
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So, the Emacs distribution will remain much
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as it is now, but if you want to have the
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benefits of natively compiled
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core Lisp files, you're going to have to
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spend that time and have GCC 10
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available
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to get that compilation support.
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The GTK only build is being prepared
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for merging. What this does is, it
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throws away
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most of the other tool kits that Emacs
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was using
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and relies only on GTK, making Emacs
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much more of a GTK application than it
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has been.
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The main issue here is that we were
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abusing GTK in some ways that weren't
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really meant,
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and now we're going to be more of a
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first club…, GTK will be more of a first
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class citizen in the
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approach and the ways that we use it, and
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be using it in the ways that the GTK
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developers intended.
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There is going to be much more support
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for xt-mouse.
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So, xt-mouse allows you to use your mouse
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inside of a terminal window,
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which you could do before, but there were
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certain aspects such as menus
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that weren't supported. So, instead of
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having kind of partial support for mouse
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inside of an XTerm, with xt-mouse,
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you get full support. This is going
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to allow
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changes in the way that things can be
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bound, the ways that
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key bindings can…, the mouse events can
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be mapped to key bindings while in
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XTerms, and yeah, little by little
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this support is being extended even
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further,
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so we look forward to seeing that
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develop in the near term.
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Once this is merged by the way, also then
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Emacs will have mouse support in every
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one of its available configurations,
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which has not been true until now.
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Emacs 27 will be soon releasing
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27.2, and the pretest for that should
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begin sometime soon after EmacsConf is
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done.
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And finally Emacs 28 is going to get
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better emoji support,
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right now emojis are registered
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internally within Emacs as symbols
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which works in some ways but does not
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support some of the special features
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of emojis such as different
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skin tones for the hand emoji or face
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emojis.
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In Emacs 28, emojis are going to have
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their own support within the
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C code, and then this is going to allow
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those types of variations and other
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emoji specific font setups.
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So, that is everything for Emacs
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in the future, I don't have a timeline
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for you on when 28 will be available,
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but 27 is going to keep improving until
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we're ready to get there.
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So, have fun with the rest of EmacsConf,
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and I hope to see you there,
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Bye.
