Re: Some experience with the igc branch

[Pip Cet]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:
> With igc the pauses are still there, but they much shorter and
> predictable, they no longer distract me from thinking on what I'm
> writing, which is a huge improvement. I suspect that some of those
> pauses are not related to garbage collection (executing code and moving
> data also takes time.)

Quite possible.  Even if it is GC, please keep in mind that MPS has many
settings which you can play with, and it can improve things a lot.  It's
not too early to become a fan of the scratch/igc branch, but it is too
early to reject it for performance reasons.  It's a "heads you lose, tails I
win" situation, I guess.

> TL/DR: now I enjoy using Emacs with this setup and I'm no longer tempted
> to switch to other editors for this type of work.

I think this is an important point: ultimately, it's about having daily
drivers.  We need to remove the remaining impediments for that:

1. The signal issue.  I don't have a good way to fix this and make
everyone happy, but I do have a solution which hasn't caused a crash for
me in quite a while.  It may be good enough.

2. no-purespace.  Merging that into scratch/igc would help, well, me.
What do others think?

3. bytecode stack marking.  That comment raises my red-flag alert,
because it sounds like we're just accepting a preventable crash at this
stage rather than wanting to do anything about it.  The reality, of
course, is different, but I'd be happier if we refused to create a byte
code object that intends to use more stack than we can guarantee we
would scan.  Can we do that?

Pip