Re: Loading souce Elisp faster

[Stefan Monnier]

>     It used to be the case that compiling one's .emacs was silly because it
>     provided no measurable speed difference.  But nowadays this is not true
>     any more: loading a source Elisp file is significantly slower because it
>     goes through load-with-code-conversion.
> Is the slowdown due to heuristically recognizing the encoding?

The fast path (used by elc) parses the data straight from the file,
whereas the slow path loads the file into a buffer (which includes any
decoding if needed) and only then passes the resulting byte-stream to
the parser.
The difference is definitely noticeable.

> Even changing the default might break things for users.

Indeed.  I think the breakage would be reasonably limited, so I'd be
willing to take this risk, but I'd rather avoid having to go to the end
of the file looking for a coding: cookie.


        Stefan