Re: Shrinking the C core

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/08/2023 04:19, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> basic considerations of clocks per second would
> predict it to run a*dead minimum*  of two orders of magnitude faster
> than the Emacs of, say, 1990.

In addition to the examples made by others, I'll say that the sizes of 
software projects have increased from 1990 as well. So if you have a 
Lisp routine that simply enumerates the files in one project, it has to 
do proportionally more work.

> And 1990 Emacs was already way fast enough for the human eye and
> brain, which can't even register interface lag of less than 0.17
> seconds (look up the story of Jef Raskin and how he exploited this
> psychophysical fact in the design of the Canon Cat sometime; it's very
> instructive). The human auditory system can perceive finer timeslices,
> down to about 0.02s in skilled musicians, but we're not using elisp
> for audio signal processing.

I've had to expend significant effort on many occasions to keep various 
command execution times below 0.17, or 0.02, or etc.

Which is to say, while I'm very much in favor of the "lean core" concept 
myself, we should accompany far-reaching changes like that with 
appropriate benchmarking.