Re: Declaring Lisp function types

[Andrea Corallo <acorallo@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

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>
>   > I worry that these declarations will become frequent, even pervasive,
>   > and then effectively compulsory.  Then we won't have Lisp any more,
>   > we'll have something more like C.
>
>   > I think somebody said somewhere that the declarations will be
>   > "voluntary", but things that start off voluntary have a nasty habit of
>   > first becoming pervasive, then all but universal, and then compulsory.
>
> That is my concern as well.  If we let native compilation
> lure us down the path of changing the Emacs Lisp language
> so as to make native-compiled code faster, there is almost
> no limit to how much time we could put into it.  There are
> always things we could do to keep optimizing some cases.
>
> This will tend to draw effort away from other sorts of improements in
> GNU Emacs.   We should decline to go down that path.

Hi Richard,

I don't think this is a realistic danger.  Over the past years the
contribution to the native compiler by developers other than me proved
to be very sporadic, and even me I progress only when time allows.

OTOH I believe performance is a sensitive subject for many users of the
new generations who often make use of complex and heavy packages.  I
believe a faster Emacs would be a better and more future proof platform.

> As long as we avoid that alteration of priorities, and use this
> information about function argument types and likely value types only
> as a kind of documentation for users, there is no reason not to
> improve the way we store it and how users can access it.

I'm pretty sure this will not alter any priority and yes, I think is a
nice addition to the self-documenting capabilities of Emacs.

Thanks

  Andrea