Re: Not protecting Lisp objects from GC

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gerd Möllmann <gerd.moellmann@gmail.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2025 15:18:25 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Sorry, I fail to understand how describing some existing code could be
> > bad.  "Security by obscurity" doesn't really work, as we all know, and
> > maintainers have to deal with code that they don't like every day, so
> > helping them understand tricky corners cannot be bad, IMO.
> >
> >> The old GC won't go away for many years.
> >
> > Maybe not, but then the code in question worked for us for decades, so
> > a probability of a serious error there is quite low, to say the least.
> 
> What you are doing is not fixing obvious maintainability bugs which
> might also show up as real bugs in production. You are writing comments
> instead. In another branch. And from what I read so far, I get the
> impression that you are objecting to others making the fixes, in that
> branch.

Yes, I object to making changes in working code that look unsafe or
not clean enough, especially in code that we don't understand well and
for which we have no experts on board.  Part of my job, as I see it,
is to keep the development version stable enough, so any change that
might risk destabilizing it without any significant benefits gets
minuses from me.

> Not sure what I should think about this.

I hope you will at least give me the benefit of the doubt that I might
be doing this based on hard-learned experience, even if you do not
agree with my conclusions.