Re: Lisp files that load cl-lib in problematical ways

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Eli.

On Sat, Oct 21, 2023 at 22:00:16 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2023 17:53:31 +0000
> > Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>

> > Just as a matter of interest, what loads cl-lib in my .emacs is
> > desktop.el.  It does this for a single call to cl-list* which could be
> > seen as rather contrived.

> > So any Emacs session loading desktop will also be loading cl-lib; that's
> > virtually any Emacs session in which real work will be getting done, I
> > think.

> > It would be fairly easy to remove cl-lib from desktop.el.  Or, on the
> > other hand, we could just as well preload cl-lib, and save an
> > unmeasurable amount of loading time at each Emacs startup.

> No, we will not preload cl-lib.  But if some package loads cl-lib for
> a small number of functions that can be easily replaced with
> non-cl-lib functions, patches to make such packages leaner and meaner
> will be welcome.

Apologies, I was mistaken, it's not quite so simple.  desktop.el itself
could have its cl-lib dependency easily removed, but it loads
frameset.el, the bit of desktop that saves frame layouts.

frameset.el makes moderately heavy use of cl-lib, including at least two
externally visible cl-defun's where keyword parameters are used.  It
would be a lot of work to replace cl-lib in this file, and doing this
might be viewed as ungenerous towards its author, Juanma Barranquero.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).