Re: Native compilation on as default?

[brickviking <brickviking@gmail.com>]

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On Thu, 26 Oct 2023 at 15:28, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote (in
part):

> Building Emacs with native compilation is a lot more fragile
> than without.  Meanwhile, many users don't need it because Emacs
> is fast enough for us without it.
>
> Theefore, we should not enable native compilation by default.
>



To add to what RMS has stated, I'm on an older machine with not a lot of
room left on the primary partition. I understand that's on me, but I wanted
to add my notes about my local experience.

I compiled Emacs as a test with AOT turned on, and found that it started
creating *.eln files. Lots of them. I recompile Emacs on a fairly regular
basis, and after one compile/install of Emacs, I noted at least an extra
40Mb after about an hour's running with erc, org-mode and ef-themes
(amongst others). On my older 2008-era machine that's starting to really
show its age, the extra .eln files were not really worth it for me. I wish
I had better news, I've been wanting a sped-up emacs for a little while
now. To be fair, I _thought_ I saw a speed increase in what amounts to
display code, but I'm not a programmer, mainly a user.

Is there a facility to purge out-of-date versions of the .eln files for a
version that is installed later, and is that facility easy enough to look
for via C-h f? This might make native compilation easier to swallow.

Regards, brickviking
(Emacs 29.1.90, GTK3, Linux-x86_64)

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