Re: emacs rendering comparisson between emacs23 and emacs26.3

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Richard.

On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 22:51:39 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

>   > > Still, an increase of ~75% in processing time over the best part of a
>   > > decade isn't that bad.  Surely?  Certainly not when compared with the
>   > > increase in available computing power.

> There has been no increase in computing power in the Free World.
> I expect that Amin chooses these older machines

>   > Just as a data point, my main machine is a ThinkPad released in 2008
>   > with a Core 2 Duo processor, which is not nearly as fast as the newer
>   > Core i5/i7 processors found in more recent machines since.

> for the same reason I choose them: the FSF recommends them, because newer
> processors have back doors.  Intel processors newer than that contain
> the "Management Engine" back door and can't start up without it.

That's a good point.  Presumably processors without these back doors are
difficult to come by nowadays.

> So please, everyone, take care to maintain good performance on these
> older machines.

> Is it possible, to restore most of the lost peformance by deactivating
> some new features?

The only way at the moment (for CC Mode) is to change
font-lock-maximum-decoration from t to 2.

Most of the increased processing comes from fixing bugs rather than
adding new features.  Keeping up with, in particular, the latest C++
standard (which seems to appear every three years) is a challenge, as
they steadily make shallow syntactic analysis more and more difficult.

> -- 
> Dr Richard Stallman
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).