On 04/07/2014 09:21 PM, arthur miller wrote:
> Just a simple question: why is there no spellchecker by default included
> in Emacs?

Integration with external spell checkers has worked for many years.

> Hunspell seems to be most widely used at the moment, it is GPL-d and
> avaialable as a dll and or static lib to link with. Is there some
> special reason why it is not
> included in Emacs as a default fallback so that users don't have to
> spend hours in configuring diverse options?

ispell has always worked out of the box for me. Can you describe the
configuration you had to perform? Maybe Emacs can automate it.

> If it is desired to use some
> other "ispellesque"
> spell editor, Emacs could just unload hunspell, and re-bind its
> ispell/flyspell functions to another dll, or exe. For me running
> hunspell as a separate process from Emacs is
> painfully slow compared to how some other applications work. Shouldn't
> it be a bit faster if spellchecker was just a dll/so to load instead of
> starting up another process from Emacs
> and communicating through pipes?

If IPC is fast enough for X11, it's fast enough for Emacs. I doubt
piping is the problem here. I've heard a few reports of flyspell being
slow lately, however. Maybe you can benchmark and see where the
bottleneck is. I don't see any reason to link Emacs directly against a
spell-checking library.