Re: Question

[Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com>]

OK, thanks for the input everyone.

We'll think about and implement appropriate solutions.
Looking at the files again, I actually think that we can make
them compile with a small number of declare-function statements.

Thanks!

- Carsten

On Jul 2, 2010, at 1:45 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Carsten Dominik writes:
>
>> For supporting different languages, we will have a few emacs lisp
>> files which should not be compiled because the have dependencies on
>> code that is not present in Emacs.  I.e. they do something like
>>
>>    (require 'slime)
>
> This is not a problem, unless it's within `eval-when-compile'.  Go
> ahead and compile it otherwise.
>
>> and call lots of functions from this package.
>
> For *functions*, this isn't a problem, either.  However, *macros* from
> the slime library must be defined at compile time, because Emacs byte
> code doesn't know how to expand and reevaluate macros.  (IIRC, anyway,
> for sure XEmacs's bytecode interpreter can't do that.)  Instead, the
> macro is expanded, then the expansion is compiled at compile time.
>
>> I think the best way it to leave these files uncompiled.
>
> I feel sick ... ok, it got better.  No, this is rarely a good idea.
> If you have only functions, it's pointless.  If you have macros, then
> remember that macros get evaluated twice: once to generate code, and
> once to evaluate the generated code.  The function that generates the
> expansion is rarely very efficient because it is expected to be
> expanded once at compile time.  Instead it is normally written to be
> as straightforward an expression of the desired expansion code as
> possible.  IOW, you're likely to impose a perceptible performance hit
> on those users.
>
> Since org-mode is now part of Emacs, third party packages can assume
> it will be available, and if leaving files uncompiled seems your only
> option, then it's probably best all-around to contribute that code to
> the third-party package, and have it compiled there.
>