I agree. The attempt to port Emacs in Rust is honorable. However, I believe a successful port does not depend on a safe C backend. I am a long-term everday emacs user, and I didn't have a single segmentation fault in emacs in all those years. Actually, emacs is the most reliable PC software that I ever encountered. Code safety is not an issue at all here. Emacs is heavily based on Lisp which leaves almost no room for segmentation faults.
IMHO, a potentially successful Emacs ports depends on a new plugin system which supports code in other languages (Rust for instance) rather than elisp so that new developers get attracted who dislike Lisp. In other words, don't attempt to clone emacs but develop a completely new editor which uses the successful concepts of Emacs.
Unfortunately, plugins require dynamic code generation, and AFAIK only scripting languages like Lisp, Scheme and Python are able to do that. Emacs has that already. Emacs's plugin system has an unmatched simplicity and reliability, and that's likely the reason why any clone has a very hard time to compete.
IMHO, a potentially successful Emacs ports depends on a new plugin system which supports code in other languages (Rust for instance) rather than elisp so that new developers get attracted who dislike Lisp. In other words, don't attempt to clone emacs but develop a completely new editor which uses the successful concepts of Emacs.
Unfortunately, plugins require dynamic code generation, and AFAIK only scripting languages like Lisp, Scheme and Python are able to do that. Emacs has that already. Emacs's plugin system has an unmatched simplicity and reliability, and that's likely the reason why any clone has a very hard time to compete.