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From: koren@hpfelg.HP.COM (Steve Koren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: An issue for the entire Amiga Community.
Message-ID: <13910024@hpfelg.HP.COM>
Date: 31 May 90 13:51:22 GMT
References: <1990May17.001308.29541@csmil.umich.edu>
Organization: HP Elec. Design Div. -FtCollins
Lines: 28

> AmigaDOS could be done, I'm sure, but nobody at the GNU Foundation has
> done it, and I haven't seen anybody here volunteering. One of the
> biggest problems, the reason you don't see the full GNU Emacs on
> smaller machines, is that it's a storage pig. Over 650 KB for the
> executable alone, a quarter of a megabyte in "dump" file it has to
> read, and 2-4MB of Lisp files for the interesting additions. Add a

Its true that GNU emacs is quite large, but I think it would be somewhat
smaller on AmigaDos.  There are a few reasons I think this: for
starters, the exact same code compiled under AmigaDos is usually
smaller than it would be compiled under Un*x (A fairly complex program
I once wrote called QRT is less than half the size under AmigaDos).
Also, most Un*x versions of emacs include a whole boatload of X11
stuff, which makes things *huge*.  The AmigaDos windowing stuff is
quite efficient space wise.  I bet the emacs executable would
be, perhaps, 1/3 of the size under AmigaDos, which is more reasonable.
Of course, as you point out, there are still all the lisp libraries
and stuff, but you don't have to keep them all around (how often
do you use ada.el :-).  I have a sort of gut feeling that an Amiga
could handle it (if not a stock 68K amiga then an '020 based one at
least).

Anyway, I, for one, would give my left arm to have GNU emacs on the
Amiga.  There's so much that can be done with it that is impossible
on any of the pc/micro/wimpy emacses, and I have a whole bunch of
customized emacs lisp libraries I'd love to have on the Amiga.

 - steve (koren@hpfela.HP.COM)