Re: RFC: -- default configure to --with-mule

Yes, I think you're right. People who need the speed will know it and usually are the kind of folks who build their own and mess with CFLAGS on the configure command-line. :-)

The other thing is that with Xft builds, it probably should be relatively easy to make no-mule XEmacs Unicode *display-capable* without making it Unicode edit-capable. (The complex parts of Mule at the C level are buffer position translations and coding systems.) The theory is that Xft already knows how to interpret UTF-8, I think (if not, the translation to UTF-16 is trivial and code probably already in all 21.5 builds). So there would be a special UTF-8 buffer display mode, which would provide overlays to hide the UTF-8 representation and display the Unicode glyphs, and a simple function to pipe to iconv (or other character code translation program such as GNU recode).