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# Emacs development update
John Wiegley
-[[!template id=vid src="https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/emacsconf-2020--38-emacs-development-update--john-wiegley.webm"]]
+[[!template id=vid src="https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/emacsconf-2020--38-emacs-development-update--john-wiegley.webm" size="75M" subtitles="/2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--38-emacs-development-update--john-wiegley.vtt" duration="5:07"]]
[Download compressed .webm video (8.4M)](https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/smaller/emacsconf-2020--38-emacs-development-update--john-wiegley--vp9-q56-video-original-audio.webm)
+[View transcript](#transcript)
- Actual start and end time (EST): Start 2020-11-29T09.12.40; End: 2020-11-29T09.17.51
@@ -27,4 +28,90 @@ John Wiegley
- Emacs 27.2 will be released soon
- Emacs 28 will have better emoji support 🎉 (within C code). No timeline for 28 currently.
+<!-- transcript: 2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--38-emacs-development-update--john-wiegley.vtt -->
+<a name="transcript"></a>
+# Transcript
+
+Hello EmacsConf! This is John Wiegley, I'm one of the co-maintainers
+of Emacs along with Eli Zaretskii and Lars Ingebrigtsen, and I wanted
+to give you a technical update on what has been happening with the
+Emacs in the last year. So, specifically we have a few notes that
+I've gotten from a call with Eli, he's been in charge of directing
+most of the technical contributions on the mailing list and monitoring
+all the patches. So, I'm more here just as a messenger.
+
+(00:33) He says that we have good progress and support for Cairo, this
+is going to be enabled by default in Emacs 28, and Cairo plus HarfBuzz
+is going to be the preferred rendering combination. So, Cairo support
+is not new, but in the past there were a lot of bugs in the code, and
+so it was made experimental. Most of those bugs have been fixed
+recently, and now it becomes the default in the next major version,
+which will enable several good features such as color emojis, if
+you're looking forward to those. Xft, as a result is deprecated. There
+are bugs not getting fixed in that code, it doesn't appear to be very
+well maintained. It was the most advanced font backend in Emacs before
+Cairo became dependable. So, now that we have a more a better
+maintained and available solution in Cairo, we're going to go from
+that, go from Xft to that.
+
+(01:21) Native compilation in Lisp will also be landing soon. It's
+currently on a branch, but there are several people using it, they
+say, they're very impressed. It does require live GCC JIT to be
+installed for it to work, and this means you have to have GCC 10
+installed. Execution of Emacs Lisp with native compilation on is about
+2.5 times faster than the bytecode interpreter, we don't yet have any
+measurements on memory or how it affects resources besides CPU, so, we
+do look forward to having more numbers and analysis to see what the
+real impact of that is going to be, also, it may vary in compute
+advantage based on the type of workload that you're performing. A
+downside to the native compilation at the moment is that, it takes a
+long time to compile even when you're doing a 16 core build of Emacs,
+it can still take 15 minutes to compile Emacs and all of its Lisp code
+with this enabled. Also, this is going to have to happen on every
+user's machine because we cannot distribute the native compilation
+products, they are specific to the processor that you might be running
+on. So, the Emacs distribution will remain much as it is now, but if
+you want to have the benefits of natively compiled core Lisp files,
+you're going to have to spend that time and have GCC 10 available to
+get that compilation support.
+
+(02:45) The GTK only build is being prepared for merging. What this
+does is, it throws away most of the other tool kits that Emacs was
+using and relies only on GTK, making Emacs much more of a GTK
+application than it has been. The main issue here is that we were
+abusing GTK in some ways that weren't really meant, and now we're
+going to be more of a first club…, GTK will be more of a first class
+citizen in the approach and the ways that we use it, and be using it
+in the ways that the GTK developers intended.
+
+(03:21) There is going to be much more support for xt-mouse. So,
+xt-mouse allows you to use your mouse inside of a terminal window,
+which you could do before, but there were certain aspects such as
+menus that weren't supported. So, instead of having kind of partial
+support for mouse inside of an XTerm, with xt-mouse, you get full
+support. This is going to allow changes in the way that things can be
+bound, the ways that key bindings can…, the mouse events can be mapped
+to key bindings while in XTerms, and yeah, little by little this
+support is being extended even further, so we look forward to seeing
+that develop in the near term. Once this is merged by the way, also
+then Emacs will have mouse support in every one of its available
+configurations, which has not been true until now.
+
+(04:12) Emacs 27 will be soon releasing 27.2, and the pretest for that
+should begin sometime soon after EmacsConf is done.
+
+(04:20) And finally Emacs 28 is going to get better emoji support,
+right now emojis are registered internally within Emacs as symbols
+which works in some ways but does not support some of the special
+features of emojis such as different skin tones for the hand emoji or
+face emojis. In Emacs 28, emojis are going to have their own support
+within the C code, and then this is going to allow those types of
+variations and other emoji specific font setups.
+
+(04:51) So, that is everything for Emacs in the future, I don't have a
+timeline for you on when 28 will be available, but 27 is going to keep
+improving until we're ready to get there. So, have fun with the rest
+of EmacsConf, and I hope to see you there, Bye.
+
+<!-- /transcript -->