3 ms·

Emacs ran on hardware from the 1980’s. How can it be too slow on modern hardware?

kolme 5y ago
It takes a few seconds to boot up, even on my Ryzen 7 machine with 8 cores à 4GHz and 16GB RAM. Booting up is normally not done so often, but also doing other stuff takes way too long for my taste (over the perceivable 300ms threshold). > Emacs ran on hardware from the 1980’s. How can it be too slow on modern hardware? Since then they've added millions of lines of ELisp code. The comparison is moot. Also we are talking here about Emacs "distributions" (Spacemacs, Doom Emacs) which come with a lot of code, and ELisp is not particularly fast.
- erikbye 5y ago
  Vanilla Emacs startup time is approx. 1 second. Even with a few packages added, Emacs is ready for use in less time than VSCode.
- kubanczyk 5y ago
  > Also we are talking here about Emacs "distributions" (Spacemacs, Doom Emacs) which come with a lot of code, and ELisp is not particularly fast. I've just tried Doom Emacs on 27.1, with the default stuff plus some minor additions, and it starts within 900 ms on my laptop (Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9850H CPU @ 2.60GHz).
renox 5y ago
Emacs/Vim are fast, SpaceMacs/SpaceVim are slow. And buggy for spaceVim I would add.
kryptiskt 5y ago
Too much single-threading, loads of interpreted code and a display model that doesn't fit well (or really at all) with GUIs.
Narishma 5y ago
Does the current version run on 80's hardware? That's not a very useful comparison otherwise.
krageon 5y ago
> How can it be too slow on modern hardware? It can be, because it is :) If you want a really technical explanation, you can profile the application. If that is too much work, I'll generalise and say that the tendency for the UI to lock when performing CPU heavy computations makes it feel slow. Because of the things you will be asking it to do (i.e. solve modern problems), sometimes such computations exist and lead to blocks of 1s or more. That will never feel fast.
earth_walker 5y ago
It isn't. I still use it once in a while on an old netbook with a couple of gigs of memory, and it flies for any editing task. In comparison, no IDE can even hope to run on that unit. HOWEVER, a heavily and naively reconfigured emacs, possibly with uncompiled elisp code and copy-pasted invocations that wait for network responses could take ages to open. If you are finding emacs to be slow, try it vanilla first ("--no-init-file") before deciding it's the program and not your configuration.

It takes a few seconds to boot up, even on my Ryzen 7 machine with 8 cores à 4GHz and 16GB RAM. Booting up is normally not done so often, but also doing other stuff takes way too long for my taste (over the perceivable 300ms threshold). > Emacs ran on hardware from the 1980’s. How can it be too slow on modern hardware? Since then they've added millions of lines of ELisp code. The comparison is moot. Also we are talking here about Emacs "distributions" (Spacemacs, Doom Emacs) which come with a lot of code, and ELisp is not particularly fast.

erikbye 5y ago
Vanilla Emacs startup time is approx. 1 second. Even with a few packages added, Emacs is ready for use in less time than VSCode.
kubanczyk 5y ago
> Also we are talking here about Emacs "distributions" (Spacemacs, Doom Emacs) which come with a lot of code, and ELisp is not particularly fast. I've just tried Doom Emacs on 27.1, with the default stuff plus some minor additions, and it starts within 900 ms on my laptop (Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9850H CPU @ 2.60GHz).

renox 5y ago

Emacs/Vim are fast, SpaceMacs/SpaceVim are slow. And buggy for spaceVim I would add.

kryptiskt 5y ago

Too much single-threading, loads of interpreted code and a display model that doesn't fit well (or really at all) with GUIs.

Narishma 5y ago

Does the current version run on 80's hardware? That's not a very useful comparison otherwise.

krageon 5y ago

> How can it be too slow on modern hardware? It can be, because it is :) If you want a really technical explanation, you can profile the application. If that is too much work, I'll generalise and say that the tendency for the UI to lock when performing CPU heavy computations makes it feel slow. Because of the things you will be asking it to do (i.e. solve modern problems), sometimes such computations exist and lead to blocks of 1s or more. That will never feel fast.

earth_walker 5y ago

It isn't. I still use it once in a while on an old netbook with a couple of gigs of memory, and it flies for any editing task. In comparison, no IDE can even hope to run on that unit. HOWEVER, a heavily and naively reconfigured emacs, possibly with uncompiled elisp code and copy-pasted invocations that wait for network responses could take ages to open. If you are finding emacs to be slow, try it vanilla first ("--no-init-file") before deciding it's the program and not your configuration.