Re: sarcasm, charsets, unicode-internal and all that jazz

i've gotten to the point in unicode-internal where it compiles, builds and dumps. then it proceeds to hang upon pdump load. when compiling without kkcc and without mc-alloc, it gets stuck in loadup, loading european.el. in this case it's not wedged so much as just extremely slow due to the continual syntax-mirror updating. this is something that's likely to be a classic case of premature optimization; the mirror table is trying to save a few cycles in the retrieval of a syntax code from a char table, but it takes a very long time to compute, and had no smarts for handling lots of updates, one after the other. i'm just planning on turning on the mirror table code

and not worry about things, only worrying once the C-profiling outputs show that there really is a bottleneck here. (we really need a lot more profiling. that's something any of you (stephen or otherwise) could do if you have a chance. remember to profile with a complete, full-on release build -- no error-checking, lots of optimization, etc. make sure to do C profiling, not just Lisp profiling, since that'll tell us where the real slowness is. actually, what would be real cool is for one of you to do this and then *write down* *exactly* the steps needed to reproduce the profiling session, in great detail -- not knowing how to do it is what has tended to defer my attempts at profiling. also, if you use any sort of framework to drive the profiling and collect data over various performance sets, please include that framework.