Make elisp faster. Easier said than done. Any easy wins already happened.
Introduce various lazy loading mechanisms and switch to that by default. That doesn't help any third party plugins that people might use. In fact any such work could create ways of breaking the expectations of said plugins!
Identify/eliminate work spent on dead code paths in initial load. Again, easier said than done. And there are bound to be a lot of, "I don't see what that is useful for, but what third party plugins might need it?"
In the meantime, end users faced with the choice of a slow new release versus a fast old one, will resist upgrading. And if there is a patch that simply makes things fast, that is generally acceptable.
The current moment provides pressure to do things right. If the cheap fix is taken, there are no guarantees on when there will be another opportunity like this one. But pressures exist to take the easy out right now. And if taken, it won't be easier next time either.
The first time you start Firefox, it reads in a whole mess of xul, html, css, and javascript. It parses it all and then dumps it to a binary file that can just be mmap'd back in next time. This is exactly like emacs, except that emacs also dumps out all of its own internal state including the state of the allocator; that makes it more fragile.
Make elisp faster. Easier said than done. Any easy wins already happened.
Introduce various lazy loading mechanisms and switch to that by default. That doesn't help any third party plugins that people might use. In fact any such work could create ways of breaking the expectations of said plugins!
Identify/eliminate work spent on dead code paths in initial load. Again, easier said than done. And there are bound to be a lot of, "I don't see what that is useful for, but what third party plugins might need it?"
In the meantime, end users faced with the choice of a slow new release versus a fast old one, will resist upgrading. And if there is a patch that simply makes things fast, that is generally acceptable.
The current moment provides pressure to do things right. If the cheap fix is taken, there are no guarantees on when there will be another opportunity like this one. But pressures exist to take the easy out right now. And if taken, it won't be easier next time either.