GNU bug report logs - #57878
Emacs native compilation on startup can crash the system

Previous Next

Full log

Message #38 received at 57878 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Liliana Marie Prikler <liliana.prikler <at> gmail.com>
To: Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen <at> fastmail.net>, "Thompson, David"
 <dthompson2 <at> worcester.edu>
Cc: 57878 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#57878: Minimal reproducible setup
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2022 21:42:57 +0200

Am Sonntag, dem 02.10.2022 um 10:25 +0200 schrieb Konrad Hinsen:
> As for Liliana's idea of disabling deferred compilation : shouldn't
> it be sufficient to have all Emacs Lisp packages in Guix AOT-
> compiled?
From personal experience, no.  Even if you compile code ahead of time,
there seem to be some leftovers that are deferred.  guix-emacs.el is an
oversight, but apart from that I also other leftovers (possibly from
init.el?)

> There would be nothing left to compile in deferred mode. A quick scan
> of the relevant page on Emacs Wiki
> (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs) suggests that some package
> manager do this.
In Guix, this is more or less a user choice – we advertised the
transformation by which you can opt-in to AOT compilation in a news
entry.  Also, enforcing ahead-of-time compilation does not fix the more
pressing issue of packages breaking with native compilation ;)

To quote Eli:
> More generally, we never expected people who have Emacs with native
> compilation available to want to disable it.  It made no sense to us
> during development of Emacs 28, and frankly, it still doesn't, at
> least to me.
I think this reasoning really falls flat in presence of any non-Emacs
package manager.  Like, obviously wanting to natively compile packages
managed by (dpkg, rpm, pacman, emerge, guix), but not natively
compiling a random elisp script you just downloaded from the web is a
legitimate use case.

Cheers

Previous Next

GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.