Emacs has tons of new features in every release, and one of them, introduced some time back, was the ability to use binaries compiled natively as modules (not sure if it's the default already, it was behind `configure --with-modules` for some time). That was one of the things Stallman really didn't want to lose, ie. the inability to use proprietary code in Emacs. The only thing he managed to get is that the module has to define a constant saying that this_module_is_GPL (or similar). While it still expresses a political opinion, now it's more of "you're saying you're a good guy, we believe you" instead of "No binary blobs in Emacs! NEVERRRR!!"
Also, the new features in the last couple of releases were not user-facing, but very exciting. Starting from `lexical-binding:`, generators, threading, new modules for hashes, keyword and assoc lists, fast JSON support, native compilation, dynamic modules - Elisp is getting modernized, and fast. While the per-pixel scroll is not likely to be a priority, the team still works on things that would make implementing that scroll, in the PGTK branch. It's a continuation of the work to date: first moving rendering to Cairo, then text shaping to harfbuzz, then all the widgets and GUI handling to GTK.
Emacs has tons of new features in every release, and one of them, introduced some time back, was the ability to use binaries compiled natively as modules (not sure if it's the default already, it was behind `configure --with-modules` for some time). That was one of the things Stallman really didn't want to lose, ie. the inability to use proprietary code in Emacs. The only thing he managed to get is that the module has to define a constant saying that this_module_is_GPL (or similar). While it still expresses a political opinion, now it's more of "you're saying you're a good guy, we believe you" instead of "No binary blobs in Emacs! NEVERRRR!!"
Also, the new features in the last couple of releases were not user-facing, but very exciting. Starting from `lexical-binding:`, generators, threading, new modules for hashes, keyword and assoc lists, fast JSON support, native compilation, dynamic modules - Elisp is getting modernized, and fast. While the per-pixel scroll is not likely to be a priority, the team still works on things that would make implementing that scroll, in the PGTK branch. It's a continuation of the work to date: first moving rendering to Cairo, then text shaping to harfbuzz, then all the widgets and GUI handling to GTK.