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From: John Turner <turner@xdiv.lanl.gov>
To: sudish@mindspring.com
Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Re: The future of XEmacs
In-Reply-To: <yviaenh0uxqb.fsf@atreides.mindspring.com>
References: <m2afrol569.fsf@altair.xemacs.org>
	<yviaenh0uxqb.fsf@atreides.mindspring.com>
Reply-To: turner@lanl.gov

Sudish Joseph writes:

 > In particular, the redisplay bug (where XEmacs hangs at the oddest
 > places until you provide any form of input) is particularly annoying
 > and is not the type of thing that should be left hanging in the final
 > 19.x release.  It bites me literally dozens of times a day...I've
 > gotten into the habit of hitting C-l all the time.

That's funny.  I've gotten so used to that one that I'd forgotten
about it completely.  I also hit C-l constantly.

 > While on the subject, what about speed?  Your benchmarks compare
 > versions from 19.14 and up.  The thing is, 19.14 and up are all
 > extremely slow on a large number of the platforms out there, when
 > compared to GNU Emacs.

Here's my totally subjective scale (posted some time ago to c.e.x.)
for 19.14 on various platforms:

SPARC IPX, 64MB			painful, almost unusable
SPARC 10/30, 64MB		slow, jerky
SPARC 20/50, 96MB		sluggish but usable
SPARC 20/61, 96MB		a little better
IBM SP2, 512MB			OK, still a *little* jerky
UltraSPARC 170E, 128MB		snappy, smooth
SGI, 200MHz R10k, 512MB		wow!
DEC, 300MHz Alpha, 4GB		wow!

I do use both lazy-lock and func-manu, which some have pointed to as
possible reasons for my need for fair hunks of iron to use as Emacs
engines.

Just the other day, a guy with an SGI Indy finally upgraded from 19.13
to 19.14.  He found the slowdown so noticeable (I hadn't warned him,
because I didn't want him to be biased against it ahead of time), that
he now only runs it remotely from the 200MHz R10k box.  Note, though,
that he uses all my setup stuff, so he's using lazy-lock and func-menu
as well.

--
John A. Turner         |"Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence;
Los Alamos Natl. Lab.  |  sound is that cup, but empty;
e-mail: turner@lanl.gov|    noise is that cup, but broken."
                       |                        - Robert Fripp

