Who wrote XEmacs?

XEmacs is the result of the time and effort of many people, and the active developers have changed over time. There are two major components of the XEmacs effort -- writing the code itself and providing all the support work (testing the code, releasing beta and final versions, handling patches, reading bug reports, maintaining the web site, managing the mailing lists, etc. etc.). Neither component would work without the other.

For a list of all XEmacs contributors, see XEmacs Contributors.

CODING

The primary code contributor over the years has been Ben Wing (active since late 1992). Between 1991 and 1995, large amounts of coding was contributed by Jamie Zawinski and Chuck Thompson. Many other people have authored major subsystems or otherwise contributed large amounts of code, including Andy Piper, Hrvoje Niksic, Jerry James, Jonathan Harris, Kyle Jones, Martin Buchholz, Michael Sperber, Olivier Galibert, Richard Mlynarik, Stig, William M. Perry and plenty of others.

Primary XEmacs-specific subsystems and their authors:

Objects

Conversion from 26-bit to 28-bit pointers and integers, lrecords, lcrecords: Richard Mlynarik, 1994
Conversion to 32-bit pointers and 31-bit integers: Kyle Jones, Martin Buchholz
Portable dumper, object descriptions: Olivier Galibert
KKCC (new garbage collector), ephemerons, weak boxes: Michael Sperber and students
Random object work (object equal and hash methods, weak lists, lcrecord lists, bit vectors, dynarr, blocktype, opaque, string resizing): Ben Wing
Profiling: Ben Wing
Some byte-compilation and hash-table improvements: Martin Buchholz
Bignum: Jerry James

Internationalization/Mule

mostly Ben Wing; many ideas for future work, Stephen Turnbull

I/O

Basic event/event-stream implementation: Jamie Zawinski
Most event work since 1994: Ben Wing
Asynchronous stuff (async timeouts, signals, quit-checking): Ben Wing
Process method abstraction, Windows process work: Kirill 'Big K' Katsnelson
Misc-user events, async timeouts, most quit-checking and signal code, most other work since 1994: Ben Wing
Lstreams: Ben Wing

Display

Redisplay mechanism: implementation, Chuck Thompson; additional work, lots of people
Glyphs: mostly Ben Wing
Specifiers: Ben Wing
Extents: initial implementation, someone at Lucid; rewrite, 1994, Ben Wing
Widgets: Andy Piper
JPEG/PNG/TIFF image converters: Ben Wing, William M. Perry, Jan Vroonhof, others (see comment in `glyphs-eimage.c')
Menus: Jamie Zawinski, someone at Lucid (Lucid menus)
Scrollbars: Chuck Thompson, ??? (Lucid scrollbar)
Multi-device/device-independence work (console/device/etc methods): Ben Wing, prototype by chuck thompson
Faces: first implementation, Jamie Zawinski; second, chuck; third, Ben Wing
Fonts/colors: first implementation, Jamie Zawinski; further work, Ben Wing
Toolbars: implementation, chuck, much interface work, Ben Wing
Gutters, tabs: andy piper

Device subsystems

X Windows: Jamie Zawinski, Ben Wing, others
GTK: William M. Perry, Malcolm Purvis
MS Windows: initial implementation, Jonathan Harris; some more work, Andy Piper, Ben Wing
TTY: Chuck Thompson, Ben Wing
Cygwin: Andy Piper

Misc

Configure: initial porting from fsf, Chuck Thompson; conversion to autoconf 2, much rewriting, Martin Buchholz
Most initialization-related code: Ben Wing
Internals manual, much of Lisp manual: Ben Wing
FSF synching: initial sync with FSF 19, Richard Mlynarik, further work, Ben Wing

SUPPORT

Currently, support duties are handled by many different people.

Release managers have been

Stephen Turnbull (April 2001 - January 2003, March 2004 - present, 21.2.47 - 21.4.12, 21.5.2 - 21.5.7, 21.5.17 - present)
Vin Shelton (May 2003 - present, 21.4.13 - present)
Steve Youngs (July 2002 - September 2003, 21.5.8 - 21.5.16)
Martin Buchholz (December 1998, November 1999 - May 2001, 21.2.7 - 21.2.8, 21.2.21 - 21.2.46, 21.5.0 - 21.5.1)
Steve Baur (early 1997 - December 1998, February 1999 - November 1999, 19.15 - 21.2.5, 21.2.9 - 21.2.20)
Andy Piper (December 1998, 21.2.6)
Chuck Thompson (June 1994 - September 1996, 19.11 - 19.14)
Jamie Zawinski (April 1991 - June 1994, 19.0 - 19.10)

The recent overlapping dates are intentional, since two or three trees are maintained simultaneously at any point.

Other major support work:

Adrian Aichner wrote and maintains the web site.
Stephen Turnbull currently produces the beta releases and has attempted to be the "face" of XEmacs on the newsgroups and mailing lists.
Steve Youngs, Ville Skyttä, and now Norbert Koch have taken turns maintaining the packages.
Vin Shelton maintains the stable releases.
Testing - #### Norbert, Adrian, ???

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