Re: Naming, and Gnus functions length [Was: Re: Knowing where a function has been used (bis) [Was: Re: Optimising Elisp code]]

[Emanuel Berg]

Garreau, Alexandre wrote:

>> If you have studied the Gnus source code,
>> you find that the defuns are insanely long.
>> They go on all but forever. This is because
>> Gnus is already slow, and perhaps Elisp is
>> as well, so they don't want to brake it up
>> into modules (smaller defuns) because then
>> it would require the funcall overhead.
>> Perhaps Gnus would benefit from
>> inlining stuff?
>
> Maybe Gnus functions length are just
> a question of style. I guess their developers
> are experienced enough to know how to
> properly use manual inlining. And anyway, as,
> as you pointed it, Gnus can already be
> sometimes quite slow, it’s probably more
> because of I/O than function call overhead,
> so this later must be neglictible in
> comparison. So Gnus functions length is
> probably unrelated.

I once said to the Gnus developers, why don't
you break down those age-long functions, to
make it much easier to read and maintain the
code?

They said Gnus is slow, Elisp is slow, and
breaking the defuns up into neat modules would
make it even slower.

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