Re: Defcustoms, how do users find them?

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:52 AM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>>>> Should all defcustoms be autoloaded?
>>> No, please god, no!
>> Maybe you have explained why, but I do not know. Why? Is the cost for
>> autoloading them to high in some way, or?
>
> I don't really care to explain, but I hate autoloaded variables and
> autoloaded defcustoms even more so.


It might be so, but what is the reason not to autload defcustoms in
Emacs ... ? ;-)

There are around 7000 defcustoms in Emacs. That probably make memory
consumption a bit troublesome. But perhaps the doc strings can be
stored on file for those, they do not have to go into the dumped
Emacs. So I guess that is not your reason to hate autoloaded vars.

And the elisp files do not get loaded just because the defcustoms are
autoloaded (as long as you have not set them) - or do they?

Or is it the size of obarray? In a bare Emacs the number of symbols is
around 13 000. In my current Emacs it is around 40 000. Does adding 7
000 (or is it maybe 5000 to add) make a big difference in lookup?

Defcustoms can be complex, but does that matter in the case of
autoloading? It is only defcustoms that are at their default values
that will be in an autoloaded state.


I would be a bit surprised if there was strong reasons to autoload
vars that are not defcustoms, but defcustoms are a bit different. They
are meant to be used and found by the users. I would like to see
something like "apropos-options".

If it is really annoying to autoload defcustoms then maybe autoloading
just defgroups would be a possibility? (Or are they already autoloaded
in some way?)