Subject: Re: bug#77469: finder-inf is not autocompiled on installation

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2025 13:56:48 +0300

> From: Gergely Riskó <[email-masked]>
> Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2025 05:17:44 +0200
> Cc: [email-masked]
> 
> On Thu, Apr 3, 2025 at 6:45 AM Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > Why is it important to compile it?  It defines 2 variables, and has no
> > code.  What would be gained by compiling it?
> 
> Hey Eli, thanks for coming back to me this fast.
> 
> The background is this:
> https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el/issues/1190
> 
> I'm trying to optimize my .emacs, and as part of that, I set up load
> suffixes a way, that only .elc is searched, nothing else.

But that's entirely specific to your local setup.  If you want to have
all Lisp files as *.elc, and if you are certain you will never want
Emacs to load a .el file, then just byte-compile finder-inf.el
locally, and be done.  Why do we need to make any changes in Emacs for
such a personal problem?

I can tell right away why such a change as a general feature would be
bad: it is quite possible, perhaps even probable, that users might
have *.el files they don't compile for some reasons, of have *.el
files newer than the corresponding *.elc files, and we definitely
don't want to defeat their loading just because it makes the session
start up slower by 25 milliseconds.