Does it matter in which language is a text editor written in?
I mean, that's not a feature of the editor, is it? There may be consequences derived from that, but that's part of the features (e.g. uses a lot of memory, or it is slow, or it is hard to build from source, or whatever).
Unless the OP wants to hack that editor, and then it may make sense if they know the language.
It does if you want your article about it to be on the front page of Hacker News. I could see it mattering if you want to be a part of the community supporting an editor in Rust, because you think it offers great potential to be more stable than an editor in another language — but the author makes it clear that they want an editor which is stable right now.
I'd love to think that I'm smart enough to get something onto Hacker News deliberately -- I'm not. I've gotten one other article I wrote hear in the past decade plus I've been a daily reader.
I'm just someone who keeps getting kicked out of a flow state by software quality. (As a general observation software quality is horrid and if you care about software deeply, it is like a gut punch).
And part of this is me -- I will run 50 plus editor windows, of which maybe 7 or 8 are tabs on active source bases. Still on a machine with N cores and 64 gigs of RAM, I don't think that is asking too much as the aggregate data size is maybe 500K of text ... I mean how big is source code really? Still the way I work seems to cripple things. I just like to maintain all my context at all times (consultant so I'm always juggling stuff).
>Does it matter in which language is a text editor written in?
It does from a marketing perspective. A text editor written in Rust would instantly get upvote and some traction / following. It also signals a much higher quality technical foundation as viewed by most on HN / internet.
Note: I dont endorse Rust nor any of the above as being my views.
If you are writing a CLI, or TUI, the library ecosystem is pretty good. If you are writing a web server, the ecosystem is ok, but still has some rough edges. If you are writing a GUI... good luck.
in the case of emacs, yes. Basically because emacs has damn near 40 years of hacking that’s been done on it that isn’t separable from elisp, and it’s an editor en passant, as a kind of side effect of being itself.
Well, it can be a signal of other effects. For example, if it is written in python (or ruby), it probably isn't very fast. If it written in JavaScript (especially with electron), it will probably be a memory hog. If it is written in c or c++, there is a bigger risk of segfaults. If it is written in rust, it probably doesn't have a good gui (at least right now). None of those are garantees though.
And the design of the language can influence the design of applications in more subtle ways, for example projects written in languages that are more difficult to learn, like rust or haskell will attract different developers than projects written in more accessible languages like python and JavaScript. Not that either is unilaterally better.
And if course, if you are going to contribute to an open source project, such as editor, that you use, then the language absolutely matters.
I mean, that's not a feature of the editor, is it? There may be consequences derived from that, but that's part of the features (e.g. uses a lot of memory, or it is slow, or it is hard to build from source, or whatever).
Unless the OP wants to hack that editor, and then it may make sense if they know the language.