Re: Shrinking the C core

[Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> Most Emacs commands' speed is limited in practice by the
>> speed of the user's typing. The few exceptions, in my
>> usage, are limited by the speed of searching large buffers.
>
> [...] For these and other reasons, an Emacs with
> native-compilation feels tangibly faster than Emacs without
> native-compilation

Absolutely, huge number-crunching computing will be faster,
but also everyday life inside Emacs, you notice
this immediately.

So people should not be afraid, they should be encouraged to
try it.

If the popup buffers with tons of warnings and one-the-fly
nature of the compilation itself a factor that might scare
people away, we should work against that as well. For example
all [M]ELPA package maintainer should be encouraged to clean
their code and get away the warnings, to not take them
lightly.

And maybe add an option to not have native compilation popup
buffers at all, so it would be completely silent.

> and IMO that justifies the known downsides: the fact that
> native compilation is slower than byte compilation

But stuff that happens only once doesn't have to be fast.
And one can think of a scenario where all Elisp is natively
compiled once and for all, like I did here:

  https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/native.el

This will populate the eln-cache with some stuff that in
practice is never used for a particular user, since no single
individual uses all of Emacs, but my record is still just 1549
files so searching the cache should still be fast.

> and the compiled files are non-portable

The files are not but the feature is so unless one runs some
really exotic processor one can still grab the Elisp files and
native compile them on the local machine.

BTW aren't the eln files portable for use within the same
architecture family? But even if they are, I don't see why
anyone would use (share) them like that when native
compilation is so easy to do locally.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal