Re: Loading souce Elisp faster

[Richard Stallman]

    It used to be the case that compiling one's .emacs was silly because it
    provided no measurable speed difference.  But nowadays this is not true
    any more: loading a source Elisp file is significantly slower because it
    goes through load-with-code-conversion.

Is the slowdown due to heuristically recognizing the encoding?

    It'd be easy to fix these to put the "coding:" tag
    at the start.

Is that really necessary?  Loading has to read in the whole file.
Can't we check for a tag at the beginning OR at the end
before trying to heuristically recognize the encoding?

Actually, I thought Emacs already did that.  If it doesn't, it should.

Then all we need is a different default when it is an Elisp file.

    Do we need to support non-utf-8 elisp files? I say we convert all of
    them (those in our control) to utf-8 and be done with it.

We could do this, but we still need to support other people's Lisp code,
so we can't drop support for other coding systems.

Even changing the default might break things for users.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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