Re: pgnus and GNU emacs 20.3 and XEmacs 20.4 and byte-compile

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>]

Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no> writes:

> Hm... does anybody know of any plans to merge the byte codes of
> v. 20.x of the two emacsen, or will they diverge further?

Prepare for bad news; they will certainly diverge further, and IMHO
this is a good thing.  The worst thing that can happen is this
situation of them being "almost" compatible, but in fact only screwing
up people who attempt to rely on this "compatibility".

If there were a huge difference between the bytecodes, we would at
least know where we stand.

> How different are GNU emacs 20.3 and XEmacs 20.4 in this respect?
> Hrvoje...?

Quite different.  Since the Mule bytecompiler features have been
turned on in XEmacs (20.3, I think), the bytecode XEmacs compiler
emits is more or less unreadable to GNU Emacs.  Look at the
documentation of `old-eq' to understand why.  (If you still don't
understand after reading it, mail me privately and I'll explain.)

When the actual Mule stuff is compiled in, things get even worse,
because XEmacs had implemented Mule before GNU Emacs, and Stallman
didn't follow the same compiled encoding.

However, when syncing changes with GNU Emacs, such as
`save-current-buffer', I tried to preserve the bytecode compatibility.
I don't think it will matter in the long run, though.

-- 
Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> | Student at FER Zagreb, Croatia
--------------------------------+--------------------------------
I luv the smell of nature in the morning.  Smells like manure!