NEO Emacs is a ground-up reimplementation of Emacs written in Rust with a GPU-powered frontend, aiming to preserve full compatibility with existing Emacs configs and packages while replacing the legacy C core. The project argues that rewriting the roughly 300k lines of C in memory-safe Rust and moving the display engine onto the GPU fixes longstanding limitations and unlocks modern capabilities: render effects at refresh rate, rich media in buffers, and deeper hackability beneath the Lisp layer. The codebase is a hard fork synced to emacs-31.1, uses GNU Emacs as a behavioral oracle to verify identical Elisp semantics, and is released under GPL‑3.0.
Practically, the implementation replaces xdisp.c with a ~4,000-line Rust GPU engine built on wgpu/winit and cosmic-text, supports DMA‑BUF zero-copy paths for GPU-hosted inline 4K video and images, embeds a WPE WebKit browser and an Alacritty terminal in buffers, and exposes animations and GPU shaders (WGSL) controllable from Elisp. Key aims include multi-threaded Elisp, JIT and inline caching, and a zero‑pause concurrent GC; many subsystems are working or nearing completion (~95% Emacs compatibility reported) but the project is explicitly a work in progress. Cross-platform artifacts and build instructions are provided, and ongoing development is funded via sponsors and crypto donations.
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