Re: Speed difference in Gnus

Uwe> I just want to point that may be you have not considered all Uwe> possible reasons for the speed loss of Xemacs against GNU. Sure. I can name a number of them. Contributions on any of them would be welcome. Startup: (1) Packages vs. monolithic distribution. We do a _lot_ more stats. I suspect this has regressed somewhat, too. (2) Portable dumper. I doubt this is _big_, but certainly it has to be slower than unexec. Runtime: (1) The extent issues we've been discussing. (2) I suspect redisplay is slowed dramatically by code kluged in to ensure correct display of the native widgets. I know for sure that in Xft most everything gets displayed twice on every redisplay. (3) Regexp issues. It's not hard to write regexps that behave badly in loops, and XEmacs's regexp implementation has had problems with corner cases. (4) Algorithms. I suspect that for most packages GNU has a decided advantage in terms of the amount of developer time that goes into optimizing for them, and there's a strong bias toward designing things that are efficient for GNU, and then hacking in XEmacs support later. Even for stuff at the C level, this is often a problem. Naive ports of stuff like the syntax table property have caused huge performance problems. -- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.