RE: Loading souce Elisp faster

[Drew Adams]

> it seems that putting a "coding: utf-8"
> comment into an actual UTF-8 encoded file speeds up loading, while
> putting it in a plain ASCII file slows it down, both by about 
> 20% resp.

What proportion of the current Emacs source code distributed by GNU (measured
in, say, chars, not numbers of files) currently requires something other than
ASCII?  If the ratio is low, this would mean quite a slowdown.  And for what?

If that's the case, why not use UTF-8 only as needed?

Of course, if the slowdown can be fixed that's even better.  It would be good to
use UTF-8 for all distributed files, other things being equal.  The question is
whether other things are equal (or almost equal).