Re: Install-time byte-compiling: Why bother?

[Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>]

<rjk@greenend.org.uk> writes:

> 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!

it certainly isn't. I have to question your results too, the times I had to
work with Gnus or W3 with only a single file non-byte-compiled (to debug it)
I've found they were *unusably* slow.

Also you should try them on a machine that's a little memory starved. You'll
find any substantial package will take huge amounts of memory if you run it
without byte-compiling it. 

That said, I would agree with leaving any small to moderate sized packages
non-byte-compiled. I think that's our current policy? Most packages don't
really gain much from byte-compiling. Just large packages like Calc, W3, Gnus
etc. (In fact I suspect the main determining factor is whether the package
makes heavy use of the cl package...)

greg