Re: [feature/dll-only-windows] A new windows build, comments wanted

[Phillip Lord]

Andrea Corallo <akrl@sdf.org> writes:

> Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk> writes:
>
>>
>> I think there are two hairs here. Having an emacs compiled with
>> nativecomp behave cleanly if libgccjit is not available at runtime.
>
> Right, at this stage this should be easy to implement (on Windows).
>
>> And having a runtime mechanism for switching nativecomp of totally
>> even if it is compiled in.
>
> We should define "switching nativecomp of" and the triggering mechanism,
> this might be already implmentented.


>From a user perspective, I think that there are two reasons we might
want to switch off native-comp.

The first is because it's broken or providing buggy behaviour. In the
extreme, and if I understand the build process fully, I guess this is
impossible to switch of in a binary distribution, because some
native-comp happens before dumping. Other than that, we can "switch off"
native-comp by just deleting the *eln files, right, or otherwise
preventing their loading. In practice, I think this is a minor
motivation; if we discover bugs in the native-comp, they would be fixed
by making another release.

The second reason is that the initial compilation takes quite a lot of
CPU. I wouldn't like that to happen while my laptop where in battery
power, for instance. At the moment, it's possible to drop the number of
jobs that native-comp uses. I don't think that there is a way to drop
this to zero at the moment. Probably, we need that.

Phil