Re: Loading souce Elisp faster

[David Engster]

Richard Stallman writes:
>     A very rough estimate through 'benchmark-run' indicates that
>     `find-file-literally' is indeed about 10x faster than
>     `find-file'.
>
> find-file-literally avoids DOING the code conversion.  However, even
> if we use utf-8 as the default, or unconditionally, conversion would
> still need to be done.
>
> All we could potentially avoid with the proposal for utf-8 as default
> is the step of choosing the coding system heuristically.  This would
> not make it as fast as find-file-literally.  It would make it as fast
> as if you had a coding: tag on the first line.  How much speedup is
> that?

I wouldn't know how to test this without implementing it. Using
`find-file-literally' at least provides a number for the ideal case with
no decoding at all. All I was saying is that Stefan's proposal looks
like micro-optimization to me, since detecting the coding system of the
init file is only a very small part of Emacs' startup time.

-David