Re: Oddities with dynamic modules

[Philipp Stephani]

Am Do., 21. März 2019 um 21:51 Uhr schrieb Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>:
>
> > From: Philipp Stephani <address@hidden>
> > Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 21:34:39 +0100
> > Cc: Emacs developers <address@hidden>
> >
> > potentially superfluous functions can't be removed any more, so this
> > question seems to be of largely historical interest.
>
> No, it's not only of historical interest, because we can add
> functions.

That's true, and I agree for those we should find some clearer critera
than "best judgment" or philosophical vague principles like
"simplicity."
Each addition should be discussed separately. Possible criteria could be:
1. Is it possible to obtain the functionality by calling existing
functions? ("completeness")
2. Is it very difficult to replicate the functionality with the
existing API, and the difficulty would be reduced significantly by
introducing a new function? ("simplicity")
3. Is there a huge performance benefit in introducing a specialized function?
If none of these are fulfilled, then the function should probably not
be added ("simplicity").
For example, I'd vote for adding timespec and bignum conversion
functions based on (2).