Re: Is compiling autoloads useful?

[Stefan Monnier]

> The Makefile used by the rather old BBDB v2 compiles the file
> with BBDB autoloads.  Does such a step offer any advantage with a
> recent version of GNU Emacs?

It all depends on what gets put in there.  But if you only get calls to
`autoload' and a few calls to `add-to-list', byte-compilation should not
make any difference to the speed of the code.

Some people have reported that byte-compiling their .emacs makes
a measurable difference to their Emacs's startup time, tho, so there
might some advantage, but I must say I don't know where it comes from
(it must be linked to the way the file is loaded rather than to the
actual evaluation; maybe some decoding overhead or something like that).


        Stefan