Re: Is compiling autoloads useful?

[Roland Winkler]

On Fri Dec 9 2011 Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > The Makefile used by the rather old BBDB v2 compiles the file
> > with BBDB autoloads.  Does such a step offer any advantage with a
> > recent version of GNU Emacs?
> 
> It all depends on what gets put in there.  But if you only get calls to
> `autoload' and a few calls to `add-to-list', byte-compilation should not
> make any difference to the speed of the code.

Thanks!

The file bbdb-autoloads.el is much like the various *loaddefs.el in
the lisp directory (which are not compiled either). It contains
a bunch of autoloads only, except for the lines

(provide 'bbdb-autoloads)
(if (and load-file-name (file-name-directory load-file-name))
    (add-to-list 'load-path (file-name-directory load-file-name)))

> Some people have reported that byte-compiling their .emacs makes a
> measurable difference to their Emacs's startup time, tho, so there
> might some advantage, but I must say I don't know where it comes
> from

I'll try to see whether I can get any measureable difference. Yet I
assume if compiling it made a noticable difference, then compiling the
much bigger standard lisp/loaddefs.el should speed up startup yet
more.

Roland