Re: string> missing?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2015 17:24:44 -0400
> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> CC: eliz@gnu.org, nicolas@petton.fr, emacs-devel@gnu.org, tsdh@gnu.org
> 
> I decided to define string< and not string> back when keeping Emacs
> small was a major design goal.  Even one additional function was worth
> avoiding.  I considered > so basic that it was worth adding, but
> string> we could live without.
> 
> That goal no longer exists.  I see no harm in adding string> for
> symmetry, now.

You say that this goal no longer exists, but the practice of Emacs
maintenance tells me otherwise.  We are still making optimization
changes, some of them quite deep and pervasive ones, for very little
benefits, like a few percents decrease in memory footprint or in CPU
usage, even under the most favorable conditions.  In some cases, we
are prepared to pay dearly for such changes in obfuscating the code
with tricky multi-tiered macros, and in complicating the code and
making it harder to understand and maintain.

So it looks like making Emacs as small and as fast as humanly possible
is still very much a goal we want to pursue and are ready to pay for,
and therefore addition of convenience functions should be considered
with care, on a case by case basis.  If it's no longer a goal, we
should state that loud and clear, and start rejecting optimization-
related changes that fail to produce tangible gains, say, at least 10%
or 15%.