Re: Speeding up Emacs load time

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 21:13:03 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com>
> 
> What does this illustrate?  That the right defaults on different systems are 
> different and emacs needs some significant amount of extra logic to get it 
> right.

Yes, but all that happens internally and (mostly, as much as is
practically possible) transparently to users.

> Passive portability (80s C): Avoid troublesome non-portable features
> Active portability (post perl): DO what it takes for the system to run on all 
> OSes.
> 
> I hear Eli as saying: Passive portability is provided. Asking for more is 
> outside the domain of emacs' responsibility

No, I think I'm saying that Emacs is very much into the active
portability business.

> 1. Every windows program would print OTB -- except emacs

Emacs doesn't print OTB on Unix as well, you need to configure the
printing.

> 2. Backslash forwardslash in path problems.  Yeah at a find-file prompt emacs 
> would be actively portable and understand either.  However if I was careless 
> and cut-pasted a path from windows-explorer the registry or some such into 
> elisp... MUCH WOE.  If lucky, elisp would give a syntax error.  Mostly the 
> paths would just not work.

My solution is to use Emacs for almost everything, and use ported GNU
software for everything else.  Puff! the problem's gone.

> 3. The .emacs would simply not be found because $HOME does not have a central 
> existence on windows as it does on unix.

That's outdated: there _is_ the equivalent of $HOME on modern Windows
systems, has been since Windows 2000.  And Emacs uses that if you
don't set HOME in the environment.

> However the entire experience puts me in Emanuel camp -- making emacs work on 
> windows is much more work than on linux.

I never contradicted that.  I said that once set up, it works the
same, but that's all.

> My newest laptop comes with Windows-8.  Makes it unusable not just for emacs 
> but for almost everything.  I cant even find the control-panel!!

Google for it, and you will find it.