usefulness of no-byte-compile [was: Re: Upcoming 23.1 release]

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Chong Yidong <address@hidden> writes:

  > I didn't remove the no-byte-compile line, though, because I don't
  > understand the original rationale for it.  Maybe it's because
  > byte-compiling doesn't provide any advantage for such a small file?

On a modern machine byte-compiling does not really provide too much
visible speedup for quite a lot of elisp code.

The decision not to byte compile some things was taken at a time when it
took a while to byte compile, and storing extra files was not very
desirable.   Nowadays none of those matter at all. 

But byte-compiling has the advantage that warnings help catch potential
problems that are only caught by users at run time.  (And warnings have
caught quite a few issues since we have cleaned up the sources).

So IMNSHO we should reconsider the decision not to byte compile some
things, and just compile everything that is not specifically excepted
(like in loadup.el).