I have far more philosophical affection for clang, but great googly moogly, recent GCC compiles of XEmacs scream. I am compiling with --with-optimization --without-assertions "CFLAGS=-Ofast -march=native -mfpmath=both -fomit-frame-pointer -flto", on the same machine I have been using since 2007 (upgraded to an SSD a couple of years ago, am otherwise perfectly happy with the original hardware + maxed-out RAM), and there’s a dramatic responsiveness to the GUI stuff that wasn’t there certainly four or five years ago. On one level this means it’s a good thing that so much of XEmacs is still in C, no-one else is putting this much effort into any Emacs Lisp compiler. On another level, it is a shame we didn’t move towards full-on Common Lisp back in the late 90s. Say, if we had the SBCL compiler at our disposal for the dumped code, and byte-compiled the packages in the old way for the sake of GNU compatibility for them. Ah well. -- ‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out / How your man stayed up on the surfboard after forty pints of stout’ (C. Moore)