Re: Bug#38708: eq vs eql in byte-compiled code

[Paul Eggert]

On 12/31/19 7:07 AM, Pip Cet wrote:

> the reason I would prefer not
> to see it installed on the Emacs 27 branch, is that the apparent
> behavior of eq will change in ways that seem paradoxical at first.

One possible compromise would be to duplicate only bignums in the emacs-27
branch, while reserving flonum deduplication for the master branch. This would
help a bit with now-incorrect code that uses eq to compare bignum values, while
not introducing flonum "paradoxes".

> Another option might be to deduplicate constants before optimizing
> forms such as (eq 1.0 1.0). That would be more work, but would also
> avoid the problem.

How about going a bit further, and globally deduplicating all flonums and
bignums that result from low-level text-to-number conversion and module imports?
That conversion is slow and/or rare already, and if we're lucky deduplication
wouldn't make things noticeably slower and wouldn't be much work.