Re: Skipping unexec via a big .elc file

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ken Raeburn <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2016 12:28:15 -0500
> 
> Question: How useable does Emacs need to be if the Lisp code is improperly 
> installed (or not installed) and can’t be loaded?

I had this same idea just the other day.  We have auto-loading, so I
went, so maybe just starting temacs and letting it load whatever it
needs when it needs that would be good enough?

Just to see what would we be up against, I ran

  ./temacs -Q -nl

and sure thing, it errored out right away because some C code called
Lisp which wasn't loaded yet.

What's more, auto-loading doesn't work for preloaded packages, because
we have code in autoload.el to skip/ignore autoload cookies in files
mentioned in loadup.el.

So my next idea would be to come up with a smaller loadup.el which
only loads the stuff that is needed for temacs to start.  I didn't try
that yet, but I did think that Phillip's work on ldefs-boot might just
be a good starting point: those ldefs-boot-*.el files might be just
what we need.

IMO, it would be interesting to see where this will take us, and what
kind of performance could that produce.

Thanks.