Re: Install-time byte-compiling: Why bother?
Torsten Landschoff writes:
> rjk@greenend.org.uk wrote:
>> On another machine, this a 300Mhz K6-2, I invoked W3 in Xemacs20
>> (using lisp interaction mode to eliminate the wait for the user to
>> enter a URL). In this case it was 10 seconds for .elc files, 15
>> seconds if it had to byte-compile the .el files themselves. This was
>
> Interesting! Where did you get that version of Xemacs? My xemacs
> does not byte-compile the .el-Files on loading (that would take
> REALLY long) but instead slows down a bit.
Obviously I've misunderstood the behaviour of Emacs here - I'd assumed
that the internal form was the same regardless of whether one got
there via byte-compiling or not. Apparently this isn't the case!
> I don't think it's valid to compare times for LOADING the
> files. It's quite simple to load the .el-Files. Try to run some lisp
> code doing heavy stuff - e.g. opening a 200k html file with w3.
Ah yes, that does make a significant difference - 67s with *.elc
versus 120s with *.el for a 100613 byte HTML file.
Then again, neither time is remotely tolerable for web browsing, given
that Lynx and Netscape both render the same web page in less than a
second!
The point is well made, though.
ttfn/rjk
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