Re: Rewriting make-docfile.c in Lisp?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> Why would one want to write it in Lisp anyway?
>> We have a working program in C which requires little maintenance, yet
>> which is used continually.  Rewriting it in Lisp would be _work_.

Agreed: I'm generally all for writing ELisp instead of C, but
I wouldn't bother rewriting this code in ELisp, personally.

> I was making a change and found it quite difficult.  I think it would
> be much simpler to change if it was in Lisp.  I admit that since it's
> rarely changed, it may not be worth it.

Maybe if you described the change that motivates your proposal, we'd be
less negative ;-)

>> Also, the Lisp version would run more slowly than the C version, leading
>> to more irritation over build speeds than there currently is.  I think
>> this is also part of the build which holds things up in a single core,
>> thus making its speed more important than, say, a C or Lisp compilation.
> A rewrite in Lisp could also take the opportunity to add parallelization
> and speed it up, if indeed this is a bottleneck for the build.

I don't think it can be sped up by writing it in ELisp (on the contrary).
It could be changed such that `make` can run it in parallel on each
C file, indeed, but it would have to be done well enough to make up for
the slowdown imposed by the ELisp version.


        Stefan