Subject: bug#58580: 29.0.50; Ahead-of-time compilation for a few more files?

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2022 16:47:46 +0300

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked],  [email-masked]
> Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2022 14:13:02 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > In Emacs 28 we added several files to AOT for that reason, but AFAIR
> > they were removed on master.
> 
> Looking at Makefile.in, it seems like they were removed by the following
> change?

Andrea removed them because their addition in the final stages of
Emacs 28.1's pretest was in response to last-minute problems at
startup in some configurations, in particular when Emacs was invoked
with -nw.  Those problems were lately fixed on master in another way,
so Andrea didn't want to keep that semi-kludgey solution which became
unnecessary.

> Which looks like a good change -- they don't need to be compiled
> first -- but it's not like we stopped eln-ing (for instance) subr-x on
> purpose.

See above.

However, now we are saying that having some files precompiled is more
convenient, as it makes the first startup of a newly built/installed
Emacs faster and smoother.  (It only affects the first startup after
building a new version.)  So the motivation is different, but I don't
see why the same solution couldn't satisfy this one as well.  After
all, the solution is solid and tested by 2 releases.

> But I guess we'd have to introduce a new mechanism for this, like
> COMPILE_ELN_EXTRA or something, if we want to AOT them anyway?

Why not use the same mechanism?