>>>>> On Fri, 18 Jul 2014, Patrick P Murphy wrote: > On Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:13:37 +0200, Ulrich Mueller <[email protected]> said: >> 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. The base64-* functions always were internal Emacs functions, i.e. implemented in C. Therefore I doubt that one could improve performance by calling an external program, which has additional overhead for spawning a new process. Adding these programs to VM would still have made sense in the late 1990s, but no longer in 2000 when Emacs 20.4 had the built-in C functions. Ulrich
