Re: On elisp running native

[Stefan Monnier]

> I've discovered that my previous measure made not much sense because the
> time spent into GC is much bigger during the byte-code runs.

The GC time should never be discarded: it's real work that is being performed.

> My explanation for that (you'll tell me if it makes sense) is that
> having to load by hand all the .eln we start the test native compiled
> tests with a bigger heap:

That's possible, but a smaller heap also makes for a faster GC.
Usually the time to perform one GC is largely proportional to the size
of the heap, and we set the "time between GC" to be itself proportional
to the size of the heap, so that overall the "time spent in GC" should
be *more or less* independent from the heap size.

Another possible source of difference is that the two codes don't behave
the same w.r.t the amount of allocation they perform.

In any case, to the extent that GC time is reduced, I think we should
take it as a nice side-benefit.


        Stefan