These Weeks in Remacs

2 minute read

It’s been about two weeks since the last Remacs status update, but development continues apace!

For readers who use Arch Linux, Remacs is now available as a remacs-git package on AUR.

We’ve seen a lot of work on builds recently. Thanks to a heroic effort from some OS X developers, Remacs now builds on OS X! A particular thanks to @pnkfelix who wrote a custom allocator to ensure unexec works with Remacs using Rust RFC 1398.

Our CI has improved too. We now run almost the entire Emacs test suite on Travis, for both 64-bit Linux and OS X. The few failing tests are being skipped, though in several cases they’re legitimate upstream issues that we’ve reported.

Work continues on other platforms: we’ve found that Remacs won’t compile on 32-bit systems due to inappropriate use of tuple structs. This is currently being worked on, but we hope the #[repr(transparent)] Rust RFC will eventually give us a cleaner solution.

Contributors have also been looking at using Rust crates to replace C code included in Emacs. Work is underway for SHA checksums, MD5 checksums and generating temporary files.

Finally, Remacs now has a CONTRIBUTING.md, which GitHub shows when creating a new issue or PR. This should make it easier for new contributors, as it teaches them how to contribute effectively.

If you’re interested in contributing, our help needed list is regularly updated with interesting ways to contribute. We also have issues tagged ‘Help Wanted’ on GitHub.

Onwards and upwards!