Re: Emacs's popularity

[Andreas Politz]

Phil Carmody wrote:
> "Lennart Borgman" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
> > On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:28 PM, Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > > > But Vim is not only installed; it's really used a lot. In Debian Vim has
> > > > > always been a bit more popular than Emacs but in the first half of 2007
> > > > > Vim really got popular (around Vim 7.1 and Debian 4.0 release). This
> > > > > "used actively" graph compares vim-common, emacs21-bin-common and
> > > > > emacs22-bin-common packages:
> > > > >
> > > > >    http://preview.tinyurl.com/5thmmx
> > > > That is a bit strange since the vi emulator Viper in Emacs is now so good.
> > > Not strange at all Lennart, Why would someone run the Emacs OS to run
> > > emulated vim  when they can run the real thing in 100th of the
> > > footprint?
> > Exactly why do you think the footprint matter?
>
> 1 vote for 'emacs has a large footprint, and that matters to me'. My machine
> has 128MB RAM. Emacs 21 is pretty OK, but 22 uses noticeably more memory,
> which is my most limited resource.
>
> Exactly why do you think that it doesn't matter?
>
> But it's not just RAM footprint where emacs compares unfavourably to vim, 
> in fact, RAM-wise it's not a huge difference, only about a couple of megs
> difference. Far more importantly is the CPU footprint.  Emacs 21 takes 3 
> times as long to start up as vim does on a large plain text file (so no 
> syntax highlighting or anything being done). Emacs 22 takes even longer, 
> in particular as the loading was interrupted with a "that's a big file, 
> are you sure?" prompt.
>
> Can you imagine vim-proponents not looking at these times (averaged over
> 3 runs, after everything was in the cache) with a sense of pride?
>
>    vim  emacs21 emacs22
>  0.004    0.10    0.20   = start with no file, quit
>  0.18     0.58    0.62   = start with 12MB file, quit
>  ????     0.59    0.66   = start with no file, open 12MB file, quit

The command to open a <file> is ':edit <file>'.
> (didn't know how to open a file from within vim, as it's utterly illucid.)
>
> In which case, why shouldn't we emacs proponents look on them with a sense
> of shame? More than 3 times slower - is that not shameful?
>
> Phil

Here are a couple more numbers :

$ time vim -c 'quit'

real    0m0.226s
user    0m0.112s
sys     0m0.048s

Processed lines of vimscript : 18867
(According to the vim command :scriptnames)*

$ time emacs -nw -Q '(kill-emacs)'

real    0m0.234s
user    0m0.168s
sys     0m0.036s

Processed lines of byte compiled elisp : 50717
(According to load-histoy)*

* and 'wc -l'

I took the best out of 3 trys.

Note I was a heavy vim user, so I got lots of vimscripts
around. If you start vim w/o anything loaded (e.g. in compatible
mode) or a bare minimum (e.g. just a simple ~/.vimrc) it'll be
ligthning fast. Maybe you can try and load emacs with a nil
load-history ?

However, vim is completely written in C with an optional
interpreter for it's own extension language (you can start
editing in vim w/o reading a single line of vimscript), it'll
always be faster, in some sense of 'faster'.

I don't know how far you'll get in emacs using only
the c level functions, probablly not far.

-ap