Re: [POLL] Use compat.el in Org?

[Samuel Wales]

what daniel said sgtm

On 1/27/23, Daniel Mendler <mail@daniel-mendler.de> wrote:
> On 1/27/23 21:38, Tim Cross wrote:
>>> As long as we keep our promise in terms of backward compatibility with
>>> older Emacs versions, I'm all for it.
>>
>> I would agree. I would also add that even with the use of this package,
>> I don't think we should use it to increase the number of versions we
>> support as support is not as simple as dropping in a compatibility
>> library.
>
> True. The Compat package cannot fix bugs below the Elisp level or
> provide APIs which cannot be backported, e.g., big integer support. If
> Org relies on behavior of the Emacs display engine or the C core of a
> certain Emacs version, Compat cannot help.
>
> The advantage would be that the maintenance burden of org-compat would
> be reduced. Many packages can share the backported functions by
> depending on Compat, which will increase robustness and reduce the risk
> of unexpected bugs. The community only has to maintain a single set of
> backported functions in a single package, instead of scattering
> compatibility code across many packages.
>
>> These libraries come with a cost. Often, compatibility code
>> does not perform as well and/or is much more complicated and more likely
>> to have bugs. The more a version of emacs needs to rely on this library
>> to run org-mode, the higher the likelihood performance will be degraded
>> or unexpected new bugs are found.
>
> To give some context about the stability aspect - many backported
> compatibility functions are copied verbatim from newer Emacs versions.
> Every compatibility function provided by Compat is covered by tests,
> which are executed via CI on all supported Emacs versions (>= 24.4). I
> make sure that no functions are backported which perform much worse such
> that they would introduce performance bugs.
>
> Daniel
>
>


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