Re: Making --with-wide-int the default

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 17:31:51 -0500
> 
>   >  > Based on this, I'd like to turn --with-wide-int on by default.  Any
>   >  > last-minute objections?
> 
>   > With a very visible description of how to turn it off, please.  Mine is
>   > apparently still one of these "old slow 32-bit machines" :-(
> 
> People who build Emacs should not _have_ to know anything about
> --with-wide-int.  We should make configure automatically do the right
> thing on machines that don't support wide ints.

There are no machines we know of that cannot support wide ints.  The
only problem is that using wide ints produces a somewhat slower Emacs
(Paul reported a 30% slowdown), so on slow machines this could be
annoying.

However, the annoyance is in the eyes of the beholder, and the
decision whether the slowdown is worth the 4-fold increase in the size
of the largest buffer you can have (respectively, the largest file you
can edit) is something only humans can make.  E.g., many people here
routinely run Emacs configured with run-time checks and compiled
without optimizations, which makes it 2 - 3 times slower than the
optimized version.  So evidently a somewhat slower Emacs is mostly
bearable, at least to people on this list.

The Emacs build procedure provides about 40 --with-SOMETHING switch,
see "./configure --help".  The above-mentioned one is just one of
them.