Re: Experiences with "literate elisp" and ob-tangle?

[Eric Schulte <schulte.eric@gmail.com>]

Hi John,

John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi all, I'm considering switching my lengthy .emacs over to a literate Org
> file, using ob-tangle, and as I was wondering if others had any experience
> with this, and if so, does it slow down startup much?

The first load after a .org file is changed will require re-tangling of
the file, but in most cases the .el files are loaded directly and there
should be no slowdown.  I've been using this for over a year now with no
noticable slowdown.  For an example of a large config structured using
.org files and based on Emacs24 see [1].

> Is there a way to get ob-tangle to compile the resulting Elisp file?

Yes, see the makefile in the repo I pointed to above [2].

> 
> I'm guessing it does not regenerate the .el file if no changes have
> been made to the .org, right?
>

That is correct, the `org-babel-load-file' function compares the
modification dates of the .el and .org file to see if re-tangling is
required.

Best of luck -- Eric

>
> Thanks,
>   John
>
>


Footnotes: 
[1]  https://github.com/eschulte/emacs24-starter-kit

[2]  https://github.com/eschulte/emacs24-starter-kit/blob/master/Makefile

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/