Re: Dynamic loading progress

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Aurélien Aptel writes:

 > I'm with Eli on the versionning choice

Versioning is a poor choice here for the same reasons it almost always
is.  Dan's design means that the module doesn't need to care about the
implementation, except for the usual reasons of breaking promises
about semantics.  It's equivalent to the recommended design of using
feature tests rather than version tests.

 > but it's just bike shedding at this point.

With Dan's design, there's nothing left *but* bikeshedding, Brother
Aurélien.  It solves problems I didn't know XEmacs's design has.

 > Interning all the time seems tedious and probably (a bit?) slow but
 > moving the interning on Emacs side won't change the slow part.

It's not detectably slow, especially if you cache the result, and the
intern-and-cache process can be performed by a macro in module_api.h
or by a function exported from Emacs.  A little bit of elisp for
collecting and decorating the names you need in a module init
function, and it's bearable tedium.  This is based on a decade and a
half of experience with XEmacs's "ELL" module system.

 > At least on the module side you can do it once and reuse the
 > result. Or maybe you shouldn't if the user changes the binding in
 > the meantime?

I'm not sure about Dan's "one more indirection" design, but in the
case where you use the result of intern directly, this has the
expected semantics: the user's change wins.  Dan's design should have
the same semantics, I'm guessing.