Re: Compilation to native

[Richard Stallman]

    (byte-compile 'silly-loop)
    (silly-loop 100000000)
    => ("Sat Feb 28 10:06:37 2004" "Sat Feb 28 10:06:53 2004")     ; 16 secs

    (native-compile 'silly-loop)
    (silly-loop 100000000)
    => ("Sat Feb 28 10:17:13 2004" "Sat Feb 28 10:17:22 2004")     ; 9 secs

I don't think that a speedup of less than a factor of 2 would be worth
installing something that might take substantial maintenance effort.

However, it could be that this test is a bad test and doesn't really
show the benefit of compilation.  Maybe this loop spends most of the
time inside current-time-string.  How about trying something purely
computational?

    The changes require NO_UNION_TYPE to be set, USE_LSB_TAG to be clear,
    and EMACS_INT to be an int.

It will be necessary to remove these restrictions to make it ready to
install.  However, there's no harm working initially on this case
and handling other cases later.