Re: Should native compilation be enabled by default?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: eliz@gnu.org, acorallo@gnu.org, stefankangas@gmail.com,
>       emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2024 22:08:58 -0500
> 
> Should native compilation the default -- ever?  Is that the right
> direction to go?  That is a bigger question than how we might schedule
> the work.  It calls for thought.
> 
> Enabling native compilation has disadvantages as well as advantages.

What are the disadvantages?  I don't see any significant ones, which
is why we decided to turn on native compilation by default in Emacs 30.

Individual users might have their reasons for turning it off, which is
why we have a configure-time option for that.  For example, my main
development tree for the master branch is built without native
compilation, because I favor speed of build in that case, which is
important for my development work.  So in that tree I disabled native
compilation (I have another tree, which i build more rarely, where I
didn't disable it.)  This kind of considerations are possible for
whatever reasons, so we have an easy way of disabling the feature.
But in general, I see no reason to think there are disadvantages that
affect most of the users, or even a large portion of them.