Re: [VM] MIME encoding/decoding

[Patrick P Murphy]

On Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:13:37 +0200, Ulrich Mueller <address@hidden> said:

>>>>>> On Wed, 16 Jul 2014, Uday Reddy wrote:

>> VM has traditionally shipped with C programs for MIME
>> encoding/decoding.  ...

> These C programs were first shipped with in VM 6.76 which was released
> in September 2000. This is somewhat surprising, because at that time
> Emacs (version 20.4 then) already included the base64-decode-region
> etc. functions.

No, it's not surprising.  Typical resources at the time for a
near top-of-the-line PC would have been:

  550 MHz processor (just one, no cores)
  64 Megabytes (not Gigabytes) of RAM if you were very lucky
  ATA-2 hard drive, maybe 10 or 20 Gigabytes.

Performance was a real issue, and in a speed battle between emacs lisp
and a compiled C program, the latter usually won by at least one order
of magnitude, maybe two.

Times change.  Computers are faster.  For most modest size attachments,
people don't notice the difference anymore.  People who get massive
attachments in the mail from others still do.  I work in a "big data"
environment so I see this sort of thing a lot, even though most of my
co-workers know that SMTP is a rotten way to send large files around ;-}

I'm neutral on whether the programs are left as part of the VM tree or
not, as long as (a) the same functionality is available elsewhere [it
is, modulo cmd line arguments]; and (b) hooks are left in place to
allow us to override the built-in versions.

 - Pat

-- 
Patrick P. Murphy, Ph.D.                 https://www.nrao.edu/~pmurphy/
NRAO Information Security Officer                 NRAO Webmaster [East]

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