An interesting commit in GNU Emacs: optimising the format command by allowing (format "%s" x) to just return x, saving a string allocation. This was already the place in some parts of elisp, but it's now documented and taken advantage of :)
https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/commit/3db388b0bf83d3138562f09ce25fab8ba89bcc81
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Claude asked me a question today: was I looking for an Emacs plugin (because I was talking about elisp) or a Rust program (because I have configured Rust preferences)?
I'm really impressed, it's rare to see LLMs ask follow-up questions.
(I wanted Emacs in this case.)
One interesting design choice in Emacs that I haven't seen in other editors: reserved shortcuts.
An Emacs extension shouldn't use F5 through F12, or Ctrl-c LETTER. This lets users configure their own shortcuts. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Key-Bindings.html
Does it exist elsewhere? I miss it in VS Code, where e.g. all the Fn keys are already assigned.
WebAssembly seems like a totally reasonable bytecode format, but I've not had many opportunities to use it so far.
Has wasm found its 'killer app' yet?