Re: cl-lib warnings

[Sean Whitton]

Hello,

On Wed 21 Dec 2022 at 12:53PM -05, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> FWIW, I suspect that `cl-lib.el` is used in many more Emacs sessions
> than `tab-bar.el` (byte-compiled size 92652), so I'd be in favor of
> *not* preloading `tab-bar.el` and preload `cl-lib.el` instead (which
> should result in an overall smaller preloaded heap).

Bugs which would not occur were cl-lib preloaded come up relatively
often, and tend to spawn long mailing list/debbugs threads where people
figure out what to do.  Therefore, we'd save a lot of developer time if
we preloaded cl-lib.  This is the most significant advantage.

Preloading cl-lib would not amount to much of a tacit endorsement of
using CL facilities or style any more often than at present, for the
following reasons.

Firstly, we already preload some of cl-*, and we already preload cl-lib
in the bootstrap image, so relative to that it's a small change.

Secondly, this is Lisp, so culturally speaking, people are going to use
cl-lib if they want to use it, regardless of any perception of tacit
upstream endorsement.  And in fact, I bet some people are motivated to
use it just because of how there are prominent Emacs developers who
don't like CL-style code, so maybe not preloading it means there is more
such code written :)

-- 
Sean Whitton