Re: Better startup error handling

[Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>]

On 28 Apr 2012, Stefan Monnier spake thusly:

> The way I see it, we should ideally be able to load the .emacs in such
> a way that an error doesn't prevent the rest of the file from being
> loaded, and the error should be clearly signaled to the user with some
> kind of line-number information.

Yes. This presumably means some sort of evaluator hook to execute some
code between each toplevel form, or wrap each top-level form in a
condition-case -- reader macros would I think handle it, but elisp
doesn't have those.

> In my wildest dreams I also imagine that we'd check for obsolete vars,
> hooks, and functions.  Maybe even give the same kind of feedback that
> the byte-compiler gives about the code.

Can't you do that trivially by loading .emacs into a temporary buffer in
default.el, then byte-compiling it and throwing the results away?
(In default.el because that way it picks up changes to the byte-compiler
configuration that you may have made in .emacs.)

Downsides: loads the byte-compiler even in sessions that don't need it,
and notably inefficient.

-- 
NULL && (void)