Re: Implementing Eclipse's "organize-imports" in Emacs Lisp

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    One of the Eclipse features that I find indispensable is the Organize
    Imports feature which analyses the source file to determine if the
    import statements need to be pruned, augmented or modified (based on
    the .classpath file which is problematic since this file is an Eclipse
    artifact).  I would dearly love to have this capability in Emacs.

It seems to me that the best way to do this is by writing an
external command line program to report the info.  And then writing
an Emacs function to run that program and display the results.

    Have either of the other two Java developers who use Emacs done this
    perchance?  :-)  I'm guessing not.

    Assuming it does not exist, I'd be inclined to create a Java
    application to run in the background which provides an IPC mechanism
    to talk to Emacs Lisp.

Why make the communication so complex?  Why not just fork and exec?

What causes the "startup overhead"?  Is it loading a large analysis
program?  Is it parsing and analyzing your program?