Comments on: Compiling Your Emacs Lisp At Startup

By: Robbie Morrison

Robbie Morrison — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 21:41:28 +0000

The EmacsWiki page on auto recompiling is well worth reading:

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/AutoRecompile

By: Avoiding the Tyranny of Other Peoples Decisions | shahverdY

Avoiding the Tyranny of Other Peoples Decisions | shahverdY — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 03:31:09 +0000

[...] didn’t want to settle for that. My solution was to recompile my emacs lisp files prior to running [...]

By: Boo Boo

Boo Boo — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 09:37:47 +0000

And sometimes you want to apply your changes to .emacs immediately. This is the utility function that I use to manage my .emacs compilation:

(defun dotemacs ()
“Byte compiles and loads the .emacs file.”
(interactive)
(progn
(byte-compile-file “~/.emacs”)
(load-file “~/.emacs.elc”)))

By: Jared

Jared — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:32:55 +0000

My configuration lives in a bunch of files under ~/emacs-files/. My .emacs only consists of lines that look like this:

(add-to-list ‘load-path …)
(require …)

I still like using my compile script as described above, not to compile the .emacs but to compile everything under ~/emacs-files.

By: Robert Goldman

Robert Goldman — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:14:37 +0000

I tend to keep the bulk of my initialization in a file outside my .emacs, for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s easier to put under revision control — I’ve never found a great solution for source code control of .* files in the homedir;

2. It’s easier to share across machines.

Now .emacs holds only that stuff that is in flux and is OK to be uncompiled (well, mostly!).

If one takes this kind of approach, I think .emacs could check the other files it loads to see if the compiled versions are up-to-date….

By: Jared

Jared — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:31:01 +0000

Ah yes, that makes sense – it runs when you load _any_ file. Any reason you don’t want to use the compile-script suggested in the post? It would seem to resolve all problems that have been mentioned.

By: Ivan Andrus

Ivan Andrus — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:23:10 +0000

I guess I didn’t explain too well. It puts itself in the find-file-hooks so that it runs the first time I open a file. If I had known about the after-init-hook (I learned about it a few hours ago) I would have put it there (I am moving it there as we speak). And no, defvar doesn’t work, which is one of the drawbacks.

By: Jared

Jared — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:24:51 +0000

Isn’t this only the case if you actually load your .emacs, or do you always load your .emacs (or does the hook automatically trigger at start-up?)

And what if you’ve changed a defvar, does that work correctly or do you not defvar in your .emacs?

By: Ivan Andrus

Ivan Andrus — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:04:43 +0000

Yes, it will have loaded the out-of-date file, but it will then load the newly compiled file, so 99% of the time it just means that my startup is slower. I rarely have anything that I need to NOT get loaded, and if I do, I just exit and start emacs again.

I actually kind of like that it reminds me that I forgot to compile it (or I have changes from version control), and gives me the option to not spend the time compiling if I don’t want to.

By: Jared

Jared — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:44:53 +0000

Hi Ivan,

Does this mean that it only checks when you first load the .emacs file by which time you’ve loaded the out of date .elc? Maybe you can adopt the compile with a script solution and then you won’t have that problem.