Re: Emacs and glibc malloc API change

[Paul Eggert]

[changing the Subject: line, and CC:'ing libc-maintainers]

Richard Stallman wrote:

> But people will want to build the current Emacs release, and
> and maybe some older ones, for some years yet.  To say, "From now on,
> Emacs versions before 25.N will not work on GNU" would make users
> unhappy."

So far as we know, recent Emacs should work even after the proposed glibc change 
is installed. For example, if you build Emacs 24.5 on a system with the new 
glibc, it should still work. Emacs may perform slower on some benchmarks, but as 
far as I know ordinary users won't notice the problem, and in any event when 
glibc changes memory allocation algorithms we can expect performance glitches 
like that even when the API does not change.

Of course this will require some testing to verify, and I plan to help with 
that.

> Also, can you please tell me what you've done to talk with the broader
> community about this?  Do we know that Emacs is the only program which
> has a problem?

I have not made any special effort recently to talk to the broader community 
about the problem. Every GNU program I know of (and I know quite a few) will 
port to non-GNU-malloc systems without any special effort; just type 
'./configure && make'. I don't know of any program that requires the glibc 
malloc interface, other than test programs within glibc.