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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

- "Performance - emacs is noticeably slow even on latest Apple hardware and I can't seem to get to it to an acceptable performance level. The bar for acceptable for me is VS Code."

Is it plain Emacs that's noticeably slow, or Emacs after installing 3rd-party packages? Some of the popular ones are very performance-costly.

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Plain Emacs is not Emacs. Customization or at least the option to customize is the whole point.

before native compilation Emacs itself was pretty dang slow on its own, and you probably have to compile yourself to get nativecomp (which won't always be true) depending on the distro you're using etc

nativecomp is pretty much a gimmick and should make absolutely no difference in perceived Emacs slowness during actual usage and not stupid microbenchmarks.

Really? Do you have any links to explain this? I find this to be a super unintuitive result because I would expect compiled code to be faster than interpreted. My recommendation for native compiling is just based on personal experience not benchmarks. Emacs feels faster after enabling it.

> nativecomp is pretty much a gimmick and should make absolutely no difference in perceived Emacs slowness during actual usage and not stupid microbenchmarks.

That is completely wrong. I'm using Emacs back since when I was compiling it on 486 with 8 MB of RAM. nativecomp is the single biggest speed boost I saw Emacs ever getting. Using Emacs on the same machine with nativecomp on or not was night and day (a Core i7-6700 in my case: maybe the difference would be less noticeable nowadays but I couldn't tell as I now only ever run nativecomp and compile it with nativecomp on).

You're the first person I ever hear saying nativecomp doesn't make a difference.

well, it does make a difference in the perceived slowness, so something about your mental model of what nativecomp does, must be incorrect.

I compile Emacs from source specifically to get nativecomp because of the obviously perceptible difference in performance. Maybe you have a much faster computer than the rest of us?

This is absolutely not true. I mistakingly used an emacs without native compilation and very much noticed in large org buffers.

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