Re: emacs empty startup time increased from v 27.1 to 29.0 by factor 3?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: John Yates <john@yates-sheets.org>
> Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2023 20:16:36 -0500
> 
> I work on a product whose structure involves literally hundreds of
> DLLs / SOs.  We tolerate slow start-up in-house because it optimizes
> the compile / edit / debug cycle.

How many hundreds?  Emacs 29 loads almost 300 *.eln files at startup.

> Packaging the final product involves an extra step to collapse our
> hundreds of images into just a handful via a secondary link step.
> I wonder if there is anything analogous that Emacs could do.

I'm not sure this is possible with loading natively-compiled Lisp in
Emacs, because there are some unique conditions and requirements in
our case, like the need to be able to run both installed and
un-installed Emacs, find the correct *.eln files on the system, etc.
It isn't like loading a shared library from a system-wide directory
where shared libraries live.

In any case, please start a discussion about this on emacs-devel, and
please CC Andrea Corallo <akrl@sdf.org>, who developed the native
compilation and tried several alternatives for dumping Emacs with
natively-compiled Lisp before arriving at what we do today.  It's a
complex problem with many facets.