- Project/product Homepages:
https://akrl.sdf.org/gccemacs.html
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GccEmacs
- Why we should include this into the repository, i.e. what does it do that the alternatives do not?
What it is:
GccEmacs refers to the --with-native-compilation configuration option when building Emacs, which adds support for compiling EmacsLisp to native code using libgccjit. All of the Elisp packages shipped with Emacs are native-compiled, providing a noticeable performance improvement out-of-the-box. Third-party packages are also compiled to achieve further performance improvements.
Emacs is generally sluggish compared to vim, a new branch was merged to main and added as a compilation switch. It does not add regressions to the use of the software AFAIK. This switch improves significantly in terms of speed, but it depends on libgccjit, which is not itself in Solus repositories.
This switch appears on Emacs GitHub mirror, but it is not yet at the tar from the ftp you guys pull Solus' Emacs.
- Is it open source?
Yes. GPL.
- Upstream release: