[Bug-zile] Startup time and ease of deployment: Emacs vs Zile

[Reuben Thomas]

I have looked into the startup time of Emacs recently. I find that using the 
same Emacs (23.0.x built with GTK) as a Zile replacement is a bit slow, 
probably because all of the libraries it has to link. I also found that 
building CVS Emacs with minimum options was quite fast. I've now found a 
more practical option: the emacs-*-nox builds in Debian and Ubuntu also 
start up fast. It still takes a little while simply to load the 13M binary, 
but especially when used repeatedly it is pretty fast. One could use 
"preload" to reduce this delay.

I'd recommend that Zile users who come up against the limitations of Zile 
try, where possible, to use Emacs, with one or more of these techniques to 
speed up startup time.

I have contemplated making a much smaller Emacs (the bare temacs binary 
which is built by Emacs's build sequence is 2.5Mb), by only dumping a few 
essential Lisp files into the binary, to roughly cover Zile's command set 
(or alternatively, to compile the fewest files in so that Emacs starts up 
without error). I'd be very interested to hear from anyone else who tried 
this.

One other improvement I've just made to Zile in git is to build all the 
function and variable documentation into the binary. This means that Zile 
can reasonably be deployed just as a binary. I haven't yet investigated 
trying to do something similar with Emacs.

In conclusion, I'd advise anyone interested in extending Zile to think 
carefully first about whether they can solve their problem with Emacs 
instead.

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