Re: Preview: portable dumper

[Paul Eggert]

On 11/30/2016 08:38 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> you didn't like this same idea very much

Yes and I still don't like it much, and if someone implements a better 
solution I will be happy to advocate replacing the currently-proposed 
approach with a better one. The Emacs dumping scheme has always been and 
will remain private and Emacs-version-specific, so we will have a lot of 
flexibility here.

In the meantime, if the currently-proposed approach works and is fast, I 
see no reason to reject the contribution, or to delay it indefinitely by 
putting it into some branch that nobody looks at. If the patch 
adequately fixes a real and growing problem and we have no other working 
fix, we should install it into the master branch.

> > from what I can see, the C pipeline is by no means empty.
> Well, it somehow becomes all but empty on the other end.

Sure, maybe 40 years from now C programmers will be history! That is no 
reason for us to reject a patch that we need today.

If we want to switch the Emacs core from C to some other programming 
environment, fine. We can think about doing that and we will have plenty 
of time to think. In the meantime, the core can and should assume C. 
Every solution to this more-urgent problem will involve some C hacking, 
and that's OK.