Re: scratch/accurate-warning-pos: Solid progress: the branch now bootstraps.

[Gemini Lasswell]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 12:27:36 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> On 11/26/18 11:43 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> > Emacs used to work OK on machines 10, 100 times slower than what we have 
>> > today.
>
>> That was back before Emacs did things like automatic syntax
>> highlighting. Today's Emacs would have been rejected for use on
>> those older machines.
>
>> Alas, we cannot assume that single-threaded computation will continue to
>> improve at the same rate it improved in the past, as the single-threaded
>> performance-vs-time curve is flattening out. See, for example:
>
>> https://imgur.com/a/FVLjs
>
> That's all pretty much irrelevant to the task at hand.  The fact is,
> Emacs users will be using computers of a wide range of power.  Probably
> as much as a factor of 10.  Compared with this, a 10%, or even a 20%
> slowdown, while not being good, will hardly be noticed.

It might not be if you're running emacs -Q.  But I'd rather we make
Emacs core as fast as possible so that the package authors who give us
org-mode and fuzzy search and in-buffer completion can make their
packages do more before responsiveness becomes a problem.

Also, new Spectre variants keep making the news, as well as news
of the performance costs of their mitigation in the kernel.  CPU
performance might be going backwards for a while.