SQLite VS GNU Emacs

If you are into alternative storage engines for SQLite, there is also an LSM (Log-Structured Merge-tree) extension in the main repository that is not announced nor documented but seems to work. It’s based on the SQLite 4 project.

https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/tree/master/ext/lsm1

https://www.charlesleifer.com/blog/lsm-key-value-storage-in-...

The sqlite code base is really well done. Lots of documentation.

https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite

Especially the VM part: https://github.com/spandanb/learndb-py/blob/master/learndb/v...

Compare it with this: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src/vdbe.c

That's said, I'm curious how complete this LearnDB is. SQLite is hard to read not only it's old but also it covers a lot of SQL and following SQL spec makes hings complicated. SQLite has great test suite so it's nice if you run the suit against this implementation.

Correct, see the github mirror[1]. I don't know how well supported that feature is compared to main branch. If it was completely stable, then it would have already landed in the main stable branch. Clarity about the roadmap of that branch would be nice.

1. https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/tree/begin-concurrent

Including comprehensive comments, documentation and tests in a codebase takes time and effort.

Failing to do so creates code that is very difficult to maintain or for someone new to the codebase to understand.

However, time and effort may not be what the organization wants to pay for, and individuals may view their own incomprehensible code as something like job security, as they can't be replaced by someone else easily.

As an example of complicated code that's still well-documented, the open-source sqlite code is a good example, about 1/4 of the B-tree file is comments, every time a variable is defined there's a short note explaining what it's used for, every function has a comment header that's comprehensive, such that someone new to the codebase could construct a map of how it all works fairly quickly. It's a good model for how to avoid the problem:

https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src/btree.c

gnu.org - contains everything you need to research his philosophy.

stallman.org - personal website, contains a lot of opinion, but I absolutely respect this man in all what he says.

emacs.org (redirects to https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) - his non-philosophical work, one of two mainstream console text editors.

Forever, there was a file included in stock Emacs, `spook.el`, which could be hooked up to automatically add random strings of "interesting" keywords to each of your email or Usenet messages (in signatures, or in headers like `X-Spook`).

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma...

Looks like copyright date of 1988:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/play/...

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/spook....

Try `M-x spook RET` in an Emacs buffer.

If you want to spare a couple of detours, you probably could start with Emacs Org-mode according to Greenspun's eleventh rule: "Any sufficiently complicated PIM or note-taking program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Org mode."

Emacs: winget install GNU.Emacs

The whole cl-lib thing is a total disaster:

https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/lisp/emacs...

They added cl- as a prefix to each Common Lisp symbol.

FIRST is now called cl-first, CAAAR is now cl-caaar .

I would really prefer if GNU Emacs removes all Common Lisp functionality, instead of creating this really wacky stuff, with discussions about this topic every year.

Never too late to try! Take your time. Emacs will outlive us all. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

GNU Emacs is a versatile, open-source text editor that offers extensibility and customization—a sort of self-documenting real-time display editor. Our thanks for the suggestion go to CartanAnnullator.

Emacs

Their DEFUN and DEFVAR macros for example let us define a function or a variable that will be available as a Lisp function, and can be used as an ordinary C function from the C code. Emacs is written in pure C99 language and works with both GCC and Clang I believe. We can just define a C function via macro, and it is auto exported and made available to Lisp. For example my first patch to Emacs was for this function (we added "count" argument to make it possible to skip enumerating files in a directory for the case when user code is just interesting if a directory is empty or not):