Re: Enabling native compilation by default when libgccjit is present

[Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> That sounds a bit odd to me.  Why would users with slow machines
> constantly rebuild Emacs, to the point that they get turned off Emacs
> altogether?  Wouldn't they just settle for running the latest stable
> release long before that point?

Emacs' release cycle is a bit slow, so there's a sizeable number of
people that build from git.

> Of course, many people do track master, but I would put them firmly in
> the "enthusiast" camp.  Such users will surely understand that there is
> a cost associated with running master, no?

I'd rather not scare away more people than necessary.  "I wanted to try
Emacs, but it took twenty minutes to build, so I'm using vim instead" is
certainly something I can see happening.

This reminds me of something I've been wondering about, but never
actually looked into.  One of the things I was expecting nativecomp to
make faster is byte compilation, but it doesn't actually seem to make
any difference, which I find really surprising.  Here's my test case:

$ rm lisp/gnus/*.elc lisp/org/*.elc ; time make -j8

This is around 10% slower with nativecomp than without, which just seems
backwards.  So I wondered whether somehow bytecomp/byte-opt and friends
weren't compiled natively or something, but dropping in 

(message "HELLO: %S" (type-of (symbol-function 'byte-compile-warning-enabled-p)))

into gnus.el indicates that it is.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no