Re: Skipping unexec via a big .elc file

[Stefan Monnier]

> A small price to pay for the advantages, IMO.

I think some users will run away screaming if Emacs takes a whole second
to start up.

> The most important advantage in my view is that the dumping/loading
> process becomes very simple and understandable even by people with
> minimal knowledge of C subtleties and Emacs internals,

Yes, the benefits are clear, but the cost is pretty steep.

I think we could live with a 0.2s startup time, but that's already
a pretty high cost:
- 0.2s feels sluggish when you expect "immediate".
- byte-compilation has historically moved from "do it in a single
  session", to "start a separate Emacs session for each file" for good
  reasons.  A 0.2s startup time imposes either a much slower
  byte-compilation, or will compel us to go back to "do it all in
  a single session".

> This would make future maintenance much more robust and reliable, and
> also allow more contributors to work on improving, speeding up, and
> extending the build process.  The alternatives all require us to
> depend on a dwindling handful of people, which is a huge disadvantage
> in the long run.

Maybe there's indeed a lot of speed up still waiting there, and by
reducing loading time of .elc files (and/or allowing more laziness there)
we could bring down the 0.96s to 0.2s *and* speed up other uses at the
same time.


        Stefan