Why not enable font lock by default?

[David Kastrup]

Jason Spiro <jasonspiro4+news at gmail.com> writes:

> Ville Skyttä <scop <at> xemacs.org> writes:
>> On Friday 06 July 2007, Jason Spiro wrote:
>> > 2007/7/3, Mike Kupfer <mike.kupfer <at> sun.com>:
>> > > The one concern that I have about enabling font lock by default is that
>> > > it can be slow, i.e., when editing large files on relatively slow
>> > > hardware.
>> >
>> > If somebody feels it is too slow for them, they can disable it using
>> > the drop-down menus or using M-x customize.  But the vast majority of
>> > people would benefit from it.  
>> 
>> My late .02€ to the discussion: MHO is that plain vanilla font-lock is too 
>> slow to be enabled by default.  [...]
>
> 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)?

Are you asking about Emacs or XEmacs?

> How common is it that people with such hardware get frustrated and
> decide to switch away from plain font-lock?

Common enough that _serious_ changes had to be done to fontlock before
it was considered fit to be the default in Emacs.  Those changes have
not been synched to XEmacs yet, so the situation might be somewhat
similar, though the XEmacs users tend to be somewhat more open to
presumably userfriendly features.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum