Re: Emacs i18n

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > The total amount of virtual memory would depend on the catalog size. A
> > reasonable upper bound for current Emacs master would be 61 MB (the sum of sizes
> > of all of Emacs's .el files). Although 61 MB is nontrivial, there should be
> > little trouble fitting it into virtual memory even on a 32-bit platform.

> The same is true for the Lisp files themselves.  Yet we don't load
> them all in advance, because that's simply not economical.

No, it would be quite economical if we put all the .elc files into one big file 
that was mmapped in and then used lazily (which is what GNU gettext does for 
message catalogs). Emacs doesn't do that because historically it developed 
another way to use .elc files, a way that is good enough in practice even if it 
might not be as efficient as the mmap approach.

The GNU gettext library was historically developed to use mmap, and is good 
enough in practice for Emacs as-is. None of the issues discussed in this thread 
mean that we should redesign the gettext library, or split up message catalogs 
only for performance reasons. On the contrary, splitting things up (or rewriting 
the gettext library in Elisp) is likely to make things slower.