Where is EMC going?

["Peter Cook" <kf2qd-at-terraworld.net>]

I realize this may not be everybodies idea of a way to improve EMC, but, a
number of years ago I was playing around with Forth and read a statement
attributed to Charles Moore - its creator - that the best wat to program in
Forth was to work on a program and when you get it working - throw it all
away and start over - you will have figured out what needs to be done by ty
then and you will not have to deal with all the work arounds that develop in
trying to get the idea to work in the first place. I have done that on a few
small projects I have done and the results were similar to the first effort
but were smaller and cleaner and easier to maintain.

Perhaps a rework of EMC would be appropriate. A rework with an eye to
cleaning up the code and making it more maintainable and understandable
would be a big plus if it is going to be used by the biggest group of users.
Also, my understanding is, there needs to be some (a lot of) work done on
the documentation so that the package can be understood. Will EMC ever be
able to be run at boot? a real CNC needs to boot up to the CNC ready forthe
E-Stop to be cyled(start button pressed...) and run without the
user/operator needing to do anything. At present Windows (and realtime
patches) allow this to happen and still maintain security for the network.

Can the code for EMC be reworked so modules for various I/O schemes can be
easier to install (without a recompile). A move towards maaking EMC more
like an appliance? Or maybe compling different binaries for each I/O
scheme - fewer files to download a runtime.

At present I still am not comfortable with working on code in Linx - large
make files and another language to learn to work with them are to me -
rather frustrating. The learning curve is very steep and out here in the
boonies (Southeast Kansas) I am pretty much on my own.

Just a few thoughts.
Pete Cook