I'm a Light Table user and developer. I think Emacs is better suited to
BitC. It has more complete full-stack support going down to the bare metal,
integrating with a wide array of useful features for systems programmers,
and like Light Table it's easily extensible.

The things I love about Light Table:
* it's written in ClojureScript, a rather more modern extension language
than elisp
* it's GPLv3
* it just FEELS like every bit the modern interface. it is the new hotness.
* it uses WebKit to render everything, so whatever you can render with
HTML/Javascript, you can easily use to extend LT (no Emacs mode for that)

The things I dislike about Light Table:
* it's not an emacs. there's a multitude of features that emacs gives you
and in Light Table if you want them you mostly have to write them yourself
* it uses WebKit to render _everything_. that means you get ALL the fun of
javascript.
* its developers have shifted focus to a new product and are not interested
in continuing development. it's sufficient for their needs as-is.
* no debugging support

I don't feel the need to expound upon why I love Emacs. It's Emacs. But
here are some things I dislike:
* no system threads, no first-class support for coroutines, basically elisp
functions have to finish fast or emacs locks
* default keybindings and settings are not familiar to users coming from
modern text editors (easy to change, but in my mind that's more reason to
make the DEFAULT friendlier)


If you're looking at Light Table you're probably impressed by the inline
evaluation support. There's a LightTable-inspired Emacs mode for that. You
can see a demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNO-vgq3Avg

There's also work under way to get elisp and Emacs running on the GNU Guile
language runtime stack, which will give it a JIT performance boost and also
enable access to modern programming language features (threads in Emacs!)

My advice is create a really great BitC mode for Emacs and integrate with
the rest of the awesome Emacs systems stack. If this were a programming
language especially for developing games or GUIs my advice would be about
the opposite.

Ryan

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 9:21 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <[email protected]>
wrote:

> So one of the things we may want to look at for BitC is look at IDEs. I've
> been reading up on Light Table, and while BitC isn't a dynamic language,
> there is a lot that Light Table does that we can do for BitC.
>
> Does anybody have any actual hands-on experience with Light Table?
> Comments? Reactions?
>
>
> Jonathan
>
> _______________________________________________
> bitc-dev mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
>
>
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