Re: Performance degradation from long lines

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> You are missing the point, I think: this variable's name is known
> widely enough to make it a de-facto public interface.  Changing its
> name without an alias will cause breakage to many people's
> configurations.  However I dislike use of this variable in people's
> configurations, I cannot break them all just because I dislike that.

I think we all understand that.  But some of us think the breakage will
be minimal.

My cursory search through github seemed to indicate that it's very
rarely usedin Elisp packages and the few times it's used it comes with
a comment along the lines of "disable bidi for a marginal performance
gain".

As for such settings in people's .emacs, my educated guess is that they
date back to Emacs-23's introduction to work around problems in specific
modes that have since solved those problems (typically by setting
bidi-paragraph-direction).

IOW, any noticeable breakage that might result likely points to
a *real* bug.


        Stefan