sig segv cut-n-paste issue with 10^6 lines

[Vladimir G. Ivanovic]

Thanks.

--- Vladimir

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Vladimir G. Ivanovic writes:
> 
>  > Is there somewhere I could find out more about the differences between 
>  > the FSF and XEmacs byte compilers
> 
> Yes.  In the source code.
> 
>  > and (hopefully) the reasons for those differences? (Google was
>  > unhelpful and I didn't see anything in the byte-*.el files.)
> 
> The reason for the difference is historical and legal.  In 1997-1998
> XEmacs added Mule which required some changes, and also did a lot of
> work on optimizing the byte compiler.  Martin Buchholz offered to port
> the XEmacs improvements to GNU Emacs (AFAIK copyright is assigned to
> the FSF) around 1999 when he was at ETL, but was turned down because
> of the Great Redisplay Rewrite; Gerd didn't have time.
> 
> Since then GNU has added a very divergent version of Mule and done its
> own optimizing.  AFAIK they never contacted Martin, and of course it's
> very possible that the offer to do the work was no longer open.
> Without Martin's personal involvement to testify that the code was not
> polluted with unassigned code, it's unlikely that the FSF lawyers
> would permit the XEmacs code into GNU Emacs.
> 
> Of course we could port GNU improvements in the other direction, but
> we have a working, reasonably well-optimized byte compiler and
> interpreter.  In fact, as of Python 2.0 I think it was, the XEmacs
> byte code was about 10% faster on a meaningless benchmark than
> Python's VM.  But actually there is meaning there: there probably is
> very little efficiency improvement that can be squeezed out of the
> XEmacs virtual machine without changing Emacs Lisp.
> 
> There are also a fair number of minor differences in philosophy, which
> you will find oblique references to in comments in the bytecode system
> implementation.
> 
> All this could be worked out, I suppose, but what is the gain to be
> expected from that?
> 
> 


-- 

Vladimir G. Ivanovic
+1 650 678 8014