Why not enable font lock by default?

Wed Jul 18 00:34:23 EDT 2007

Jason Spiro writes:

 > I am used to GNU Emacs and new to XEmacs.  I wonder:  How slow is plain
 > font-lock on recent hardware (3 years old or less)?  How common is it that
 > people with such hardware get frustrated and decide to switch away from plain
 > font-lock?

It's slow enought to cause noticable delays in loading files on a
4-core 1.8GHz Opteron box.  Is that "recent" hardware?