Re: Should native compilation be enabled by default?

[Björn Bidar]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>   > > Enabling native compilation has disadvantages as well as advantages.
>
>   > What are the disadvantages?
>
> If Emacs compilation by default causes native compilation, it will be
> slower.
>
At first a little but once the compilation for a file is done Emacs will
be faster.
> It will also be more fragile.  Byte-compilation is a self-contained
> Emacs feature, and aside from occasional bugs that affect specific
> code, it never breaks.  On general principles we can see that native
> compilation is likely to go wrong because something has disappeared,
> or because of bugs in other programs that you wouldnt otherwise ever
> use.
>

Native compilation adds libgccjit as a dependency but from what I saw
the not self contained or self contained nature of native-compilation
was never an issue.

> Native compilation is useful mainly for power users who want
> to run Lisp programs that normally are too slow.  There is no sense
> directing most users into doing things gthe complex way instead
> of the simple way.

I don't "power user" is the right word here. Most users that actively
choose native compilation had some kind of use case that was to slow
e.g. programming with lsp that made use Emacs with native compilation
but I would say most of them were experienced.

Some distributions ship native compilation by default e.g. openSUSE.