What, Remacs ?!!

Remacs is a project created by Wilfred aimed at porting C part of GNU Emacs to Rust. If you are a programmer and don’t know what GNU Emacs is, you have been missing one of the most powerful development tools. Have a look.

It has been 4 months since my first contribution to Remacs. This post summarises the evolution of primitive lisp function definition in Rust over time. You can find more development reports here.

Evolution of Lisp functions in Rust

Lisp Function Definition in C

In C, lisp function definition has two parts, definition and initialization. Definition uses a DEFUN macro and it looks like:

DEFUN ( "name-in-lisp" , name_in_c , structname , min_args , max_args , intspec , doc : /*doc string*/ ) ( arguments ..) { // function body }

DEFUN macro creates a static Lisp_Subr struct and stores function metadata ie, name-in-lisp , min_args , max_args , intspec and doc along with a pointer to name_in_c function in its fields.

During initialization, defsubr function creates Lisp_Object s corresponding to each Lisp_Subr . These defsubr s are collected in a syms_of_module function in each C file and are invoked at startup by the main function in emacs.c .

void syms_of_module ( void ) { defsubr ( & struct_name ); }

Moving To Rust, Early Attempts

Enough C for now. Let’s have a look at the Rust part. The very first attempts to port lisp function was to literally rewrite the expanded DEFUN macro in Rust. As a result, definition in Rust was extremely verbose at the beginning.

fn name_in_c ( arguments .. ) -> LispObject { // function body } lazy_static! { pub static ref structname : LispSubr = LispSubr { header : VectorLikeHeader { size : (( PvecType :: PVEC_SUBR as libc :: c_int ) << PSEUDOVECTOR_AREA_BITS ) as ptrdiff_t , }, function : ( name_in_c as * const libc :: c_void ), min_args : min_args , max_args : max_args , symbol_name : ( "name-in-lisp \ 0" .as_ptr ()) as * const c_char , intspec : intspec doc : ( "docstring" .as_ptr ()) as * const c_char , }; }

And initialization in rust_src/lib.rs :

pub extern "C" fn rust_init_syms () { unsafe { defsubr ( &* module :: structname ); } }

For simplicity I keep both of definition and initialization code in a single block in this post.

defun! macro

Later on, the lazy_static! part has been replaced by a defun! macro. Which shortened the definition to:

fn name_in_c ( arguments .. ) -> LispObject { // function body } defun! ( "name-in-lisp" , name_in_c , structname , min_args , max_args , ptr :: null (), "docstring" ); pub extern "C" fn rust_init_syms () { unsafe { defsubr ( &* module :: structname ); } }

Yes, defun! was a great improvement and syntax was comparable to C. But that was not the best what Rust can offer. After a couple of months, Jean Pierre Dudey proposed lisp_fn procedural macro in PR 181.

lisp_fn Procedural Macro

Procedural macro a.k.a syntax extension a.k.a compiler plugin is a powerful Rust feature that allows manipulation code on the fly. It enables user to define functions that takes some Rust code, manipulates and produces Rust code as output.

lisp_fn has made function definitions more concise. It derives name of function in lisp by replacing underscores with hyphens and calculates minimum and maximum number of arguments from the function signature. The definition now looks like:

/// docstring #[lisp_fn(name= "optional_name" ,min= "min_args" )] fn name_in_c ( arguments .. ) -> LispObject { // function body } pub extern "C" fn rust_init_syms () { unsafe { defsubr ( &* module :: structname ); } }

More magic…

Though lisp_fn has made defining lisp functions easier, there were some nits. Rust, by default, does not expose functions to higher scopes. So, functions defined in the Rust cannot be called from C until the compiler is instructed to export them.

This has resulted in accumulation of whole list of functions which are ported to Rust and still referenced from C besides rust_init_syms function which holds the entire list of ported functions in rust_src/lib.rs file.

There were a couple of attempts to tackle some of this mess. Sean Perry implemented a comprehensive solution which utilizes Rust’s build script to scan the entire rust code base and export all the lisp functions. The script also creates a module_exports.rs file for each modules that calls defsubr on lisp functions defined on that module wrapped in a rust_init_syms function.

This reduced the size of rust_src/lib.rs file from around 500 lines to 88 lines with an overhead of single line in module files.

What Next ?

The Rust language is improving day by day so does Remacs. So we can expect more.