Zawinski: Yeah. And it was slow so I started digging into why it was slow and I realized, oh, it’s slow because the compiler sucks. So I rewrote the compiler, which was my first run-in with the intransigence of Stallman. So I knew a lot about Emacs.
Seibeclass="underline" So the change to the byte compiler, did it change the bytecode format or did it just change the compiler?
Zawinski: It actually had a few options—I made some changes at the C layer, the byte-code interpreter, added a few new instructions that sped things up. But the compiler could be configured to emit either old-style byte-code or ones that took advantage of the new codes.
So I write a new compiler and Stallman’s response is, “I see no need for this change.” And I’m like, “What are you talking about? It generates way faster code.” Then his next response is, “Okay, uh, send me a diff and explain each line you changed.” “Well, I didn’t do that—I rewrote it because the old one was crap.” That was not OK. The only reason it ever got folded in was because I released it and thousands of people started using it and they loved it and they nagged him for two years and finally he put it in because he was tired of being nagged about it.
Seibeclass="underline" Did you sign the papers assigning the copyright to the Free Software Foundation?
Zawinski: Oh yeah, I did that right away. I think that was probably the first thing in the email. It was like, send me a diff for each line and sign this. So I signed and said, “I can’t do the rest; can’t send you a diff; that’s ridiculous. It’s well documented; go take a look.” I don’t think he ever did.
There’s this myth that there was some legal issue between Lucid and FSF and that’s absolutely not true—we assigned copyrights for everything we did to them. It was convenient for them to pretend we hadn’t at certain times. Like, we actually submitted the paperwork multiple times because they’d be like, “Oh, oh, we seem to have lost it.” I think there was some kind of brouhaha with assignments and XEmacs much later, but that was way after my time.
Seibeclass="underline" So you started with Lisp. But you obviously didn’t stick with it for your whole career. What came next?
Zawinski: Well, the next language I did any serious programming in after Lisp was C, which was kind of like going back to the assembly I programmed on an Apple II. It’s the PDP-11 assembler that thinks it’s a language. Which was, you know, unpleasant. I’d tried to avoid it for as long as possible. And C++ is just an abomination. Everything is wrong with it in every way. So I really tried to avoid using that as much as I could and do everything in C at Netscape. Which was pretty easy because we were targeting pretty small machines that didn’t run C++ programs well because C++ tends to bloat like crazy as soon as you start using any libraries. Plus the C++ compilers were all in flux—there were lots of incompatibility problems. So we just settled on ANSI C from the beginning and that served us pretty well. After that Java felt like going back to Lisp a bit in that there were concepts that the language wasn’t bending over backwards trying to make you avoid—that were comfortable again.
Seibeclass="underline" Like what?
Zawinski: Memory management. That functions felt more like functions than subroutines. There was much more enforced modularity to it. It’s always tempting to throw in a goto in C code just because it’s easy.
Seibeclass="underline" So these days it seems like you’re mostly doing C and Perl.
Zawinski: Well, I don’t really program very much anymore. Mostly I write stupid little Perl scripts to keep my servers running. I end up writing a lot of goofy things for getting album art for MP3s I have—that kind of thing. Just tiny brute-force throw-away programs.
Seibeclass="underline" Do you like Perl or is it just handy?
Zawinski: Oh, I despise it. It’s a horrible language. But it is installed absolutely everywhere. Any computer you sit down on, you’re never going to have to talk someone through installing Perl to run your script. Perl is there already. That’s really the one and only thing that recommends it.
It has an OK collection of libraries. There’s often a library for doing the thing you want. And often it doesn’t work very well, but at least there’s something. The experience of writing something in Java and then trying to figure out—I myself have trouble installing Java on my computer—it’s horrible. I think Perl is a despicable language. If you use little enough of it, you can make it kind of look like C—or I guess more like JavaScript than like C. Its syntax is crazy, if you use it. Its data structures are a mess. There’s not a lot good about it.
Seibeclass="underline" But not as bad as C++.
Zawinski: No, absolutely not. It’s for different things. There’s stuff that would be so much easier to write in Perl or any language like Perl than in C just because they’re text-oriented—all these so-called “scripting languages”. Which is a distinction I don’t really buy—“programming” versus “scripting”. I think that’s nonsense. But if what you’re doing is fundamentally manipulating text or launching programs, like running wget and pulling some HTML out and pattern-matching it, it’s going to be easier to do that in Perl than even Emacs Lisp.
Seibeclass="underline" To say nothing of, Emacs Lisp is not going to be very suitable for command-line utilities.
Zawinski: Yeah, though I used to write just random little utilities in Emacs all the time. There was actually a point, early on in Netscape, where part of our build process involved running “emacs -batch” to manipulate some file. No one really appreciated that.
Seibeclass="underline" No. I imagine they wouldn’t. What about XScreenSaver—do you still work on that?
Zawinski: I still write new screen savers every now and then just for kicks, and that’s all C.
Seibeclass="underline" Do you use some kind of IDE for that?
Zawinski: I just use Emacs, mostly. Though recently, I ported XScreenSaver to OS X. The way I did that was I reimplemented Xlib in terms of Cocoa, the Mac graphics substrate, so I wouldn’t have to change the source code of all the screen savers. They’re still making X calls but I implemented the back end for each of those. And that was in Objective C, which actually is a pretty nice language. I enjoyed doing that. It definitely feels Java-like in the good ways but it also feels like C. Because it’s essentially C, you can still link directly with C code and just call the functions and not have to bend over backwards.
Seibeclass="underline" At Lucid, leaving aside the politics of Emacs development, what technical stuff did you learn?
Zawinski: I definitely became a better programmer while I was there. Largely because that was really the smartest group of people I’ve been around. Everyone who worked there was brilliant. And it was just nice to be in that kind of environment where when someone says, “That’s nonsense,” or “We should do it this way,” you can just take their word for it, believe that they know what they were talking about. That was really nice. Not that I hadn’t been around smart people before. But it was just such a high-quality group of people there, consistently.
Seibeclass="underline" And how big was the development team?
Zawinski: I think there were like 70 people at the company so probably; I don’t know, 40 or so on the development team. The Energize team was maybe 25 people, 20. It was divided up into pretty distinct areas. There were the folks working on the compiler side of things and the back-end database side of things. The GUI stuff that wasn’t Emacs. And then there was, at one point, me and two or three other people working on integrating Emacs with the environment. That eventually turned into mostly me working on mostly Emacs stuff, trying to make our Emacs 19 be usable, be an editor that doesn’t crash all the time, and actually runs all the Emacs packages that you expect it to run.