Re: Time to drop the pre-dump phase in the build?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: esr@thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond)
> Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2014 14:15:30 -0500 (EST)
> 
> (2) Even in the non-crossbuild case, it requires a whole lot of
>     build-system hair we could otherwise do without.

Like what?

> (3) Back when I last looked at it (admittedly a long time ago) 
>     the dump code was both the largest single source of porting
>     problems and a serious attractor of crash bugs.  

Didn't hear about these in a while, perhaps several years.

> (4) We're presently buying some startup speed at the cost of a larger
>     minimum working set.

That's not true: we only preload stuff that is almost immediately
necessary anyway.  You'd have almost the same footprint before you
type anything in Emacs after it starts, even if you start "emacs -Q",
let alone a full-blown session that loads a .emacs.

In any case, without showing numbers for the footprint, and some
analysis of which files might not be needed right away, it's very hard
to have a rational discussion.

> If anybody wants to own this problem, comparative benchmarking seems
> like a good place to start.  That is, hard numbers about the 
> actual performance effects of pre-dumping.  That'd head off a
> lot of arguments, anyway.

I suggest to file a feature request bug report, so that this (and any
followups) gets recorded

> (Why, yes.  I *do* enjoy shaking up peoples' long-held assumptions.
> This wasn't obvious already?)

Let's have one revolution at a time, shall we?