[levosmetalo]

And this is the key part. As soon as we start getting Linux only packages that depend on some library easily available only on Linux, Windows users will be pushed off.

So far Emacs has been, for many users, nice abstraction over the OS. As soon as I'm not able to use the same packages and have the same setup on both Linux and Windows, I won't use it anywhere and start looking at the alternatives.

[dgtized]

How is this any different than functionality that requires a specific executable to be called from Emacs. Some of those executables are platform specific. Last I checked using ispell on windows meant playing games with cygwin or some other fix.

The purpose of this is not to limit functionality to a specific platform, it's to expand the capabilities of Emacs. My understanding is FFI is intended to work on all platforms that Emacs support, so it just means the library authors need to provide platform specific support, just the same as they do with packages that depend on specific binaries in the path.

Throwing out a new feature that provides obvious benefits because of imagined future packages that may choose against being platform agnostic seems rather short sighted.