Jonathan Walther writes: > On Sat, 8 May 1999, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>> 3. A lot of the Emacs packages spend ages byte-compiling various >> files during the install. Given that the results might well never be >> used this seems rather wasteful. Also it's quite time-consuming, even >> on a fast machine; I hate to think what it'd be like on a much slower >> machine. > > I've never found it to take more than a few minutes. Again, if you want to > submit a patch to emacs so that packages are byte-compiled when they are > first called, feel free. Actually, I've just done some timings. On one machine, a 233Mhz K6, I invoked Gnus in Xemacs20. When the byte-compiled .elc files were available, it took 12 seconds. When they weren't, and emacs had to byte-compile on the fly, it took 14 seconds. On another machine, this a 300Mhz K6-2, I invoked W3 in Xemacs20 (using lisp interaction mode to eliminate the wait for the user to enter a URL). In this case it was 10 seconds for .elc files, 15 seconds if it had to byte-compile the .el files themselves. This was to retrieve and render a 4Kbyte web page with no images/frames/etc, retrieved via the local ethernet. Now these are delays that you have to suffer once per Emacs session, not each time you enter Gnus/view a web page/etc. We're talking at best a 30% improvement from those numbers. My methods are hardly scientific, I know - perhaps others can produce similar comparisons for slower or faster machines. What's the cost of install-time byte-compilation? In my experience it's an incredibly fragile process; see for example my recently submitted bug report #37355. Right now I don't have a correctly installed emacs19 or emacs20 on lyonesse (which is one reasons why I only used Xemacs20 above). I suggest, therefore, that the install-time byte-compilation of elisp files be either eliminated completely, or turned into an option, with the default set to "off". ttfn/rjk