On Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:13:37 +0200, Ulrich Mueller <[email protected]> said:
>>>>>> On Wed, 16 Jul 2014, Uday Reddy wrote: >> VM has traditionally shipped with C programs for MIME >> encoding/decoding. ... > These C programs were first shipped with in VM 6.76 which was released > in September 2000. This is somewhat surprising, because at that time > Emacs (version 20.4 then) already included the base64-decode-region > etc. functions. No, it's not surprising. Typical resources at the time for a near top-of-the-line PC would have been: 550 MHz processor (just one, no cores) 64 Megabytes (not Gigabytes) of RAM if you were very lucky ATA-2 hard drive, maybe 10 or 20 Gigabytes. Performance was a real issue, and in a speed battle between emacs lisp and a compiled C program, the latter usually won by at least one order of magnitude, maybe two. Times change. Computers are faster. For most modest size attachments, people don't notice the difference anymore. People who get massive attachments in the mail from others still do. I work in a "big data" environment so I see this sort of thing a lot, even though most of my co-workers know that SMTP is a rotten way to send large files around ;-} I'm neutral on whether the programs are left as part of the VM tree or not, as long as (a) the same functionality is available elsewhere [it is, modulo cmd line arguments]; and (b) hooks are left in place to allow us to override the built-in versions. - Pat -- Patrick P. Murphy, Ph.D. https://www.nrao.edu/~pmurphy/ NRAO Information Security Officer NRAO Webmaster [East] Ég skildi, að orð er á Íslandi til um allt, sem er hugsað á jorðu.
