Re: What's missing in ELisp that makes people want to use cl-lib?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gerd Möllmann <gerd.moellmann@gmail.com>
> Cc: joaotavora@gmail.com,  michael_heerdegen@web.de,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2023 07:59:13 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> Seq is 10 years in Emacs
> >
> > It is preloaded only since a little more than a year ago.
> 
> You're saying that the real promotion of seq is only a year old?

Yes.

> And that things will "improve" once the promotion picks up speed?

No.  I'm saying that we are still very far from a point where we have
enough data to decide whether that year-old decision was wrong or not.
Whether we see an improvement or not, time will say.

> >> its polymorphism is unused in the tree.
> >
> > Searching for seq-* in the tree brings more than 590 hits in more than
> > 170 Lisp files.
> 
> And? The polymorphism isn't used.

Then I guess I don't understand what you mean by "polymorphism".

> >> Joao showed that it's slow.
> >
> > No, he didn't.
> 
> Aha.

No, really.  What he showed is that seq.el is in most (though not all)
cases _slower_ than the corresponding cl-lib functions.  Sometimes
much slower, sometimes slightly slower (and in at least one case
faster).  But that doesn't mean seq.el is "slow", enough to make its
use nonsensical.  Because why should we care that some call takes 2
usec instead of just 0.5 usec? both are negligible.  The difference
will only become visible if someone needs to call these in a very
tight loop with a very large number of iterations.

IOW, "slower" is not the same as "slow".  If we cared about "slow", we
would have implemented everything in C.  We didn't because we have
"other considerations", which are important to us and outweigh "slow"
when "slow" is "fast enough".  Exactly like in the case of seq.el vs
cl-lib.  Those "other considerations" in the latter case were
abundantly described and explained up-thread, so I'm sure you know
what they are, even though you disagree.

> I've lost hope to hear something concrete a while ago.

Same here, sadly.