Re: Some developement questions

[hw <hw@adminart.net>]

Radon Rosborough <radon.neon@gmail.com> writes:

>> If the messages are just printed in the message buffer it shouldn't
>> impact too much the startup time I think.
>
> To do the kind of analysis you are talking about, one would have to
> hook into really basic subroutines like `setq`. I don't have any
> numbers to back this up, but that sounds like it would be a massive
> slowdown for all Elisp code. Alternatively, you'd have to do a lot of
> heavy static analysis because what defines a "outdated, deprecated, or
> useless" setting is actually quite nebulous and complicated.

In theory, Emacs could find out which variables are being defined in
~/.emacs and whether they are already known or not, like by checking if
they can successfully be described.  The unknown variables could then be
brought to the attention of the user.  Perhaps a few other things could
be done, too.

> I do actually think this is an interesting idea, but it would
> definitely best be implemented as either a third-party package or some
> optional user library in core that either does static analysis or
> allows one to load the init-file with profiling enabled like ESUP [1]
> (or both).

How difficult would it be to do the above?

>> a number of people find even an extra 0.5s-1.0s in startup to be
>> significant
>
> I am one of those people, and actually I find even an extra 50ms of
> startup time to be unacceptable unless there's a good reason for it.
> My ~5,000 line configuration [2] which pulls in ~130 packages takes
> only ~250ms to load, according to a startup profiler -- meaning 0.6s
> to go from nothing to a full graphical frame.
>
> Why bother with the Emacs server when you can just make Emacs start up
> as fast as Vim? ;)

How is it relevant whether it takes 50ms more or less to start Emacs?
Is that even within the error margin of the measurements, like changes
in temperature might cause larger differences than that.

I just keep Emacs running on my server in a tmux session.  With a
terminal that has good colours, it's quite ok.  I could even use it
without booting my workstation by just switching the monitor input: 50ms
more or less are nothing compared to that, you can't keep up with me
anyway ;P

Unfortunately, the Emacs server can still not be used from remote
machines --- or can it finally?

Other than that, the Emacs server is useful to push a file into Emacs
from the terminal and things like that.  Why not just use it, it's
probably faster than 0.6s before you can edit a file.


> [1]: https://github.com/jschaf/esup
> [2]: https://github.com/raxod502/radian