Impact of code difference in Collection#contains() worth improving?

[Martin Buchholz]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 7:53 PM, Guy Steele <guy.steele at oracle.com> wrote:

>
> But I cannot resist recalling that one of the earliest pieces of software
> in the implementation of EMACS (back when the implementation language was
> TECO, a text-editing language) was a routine that, when it loaded TECO
> macros from a file, would carefully remove comments and excess whitespace
> in order to improve the execution speed of the macros (and therefore the
> response time of the EMACS keystrokes)!  We have come a long, long way in
> 38 years.
>

I often think we haven't made enough progress on the basic things. Worrying
about comments in our TECO macros is a lot like worrying about dead
assertion code in our compiled bytecode.

And we are still plagued by fixed size native stacks, the 64k bytecode size
limit, unreliable Unix signals, and of course, unavailability of tail
recursion.