bug#22763: 25.1.50; Feature Request -- A faster method to obtain line number at position.

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
>> Why is it faster?
>>
>> Is it still always Θ(N) just with a smaller constant (if so, what makes
>> the constant smaller), or does it benefit from some kind of caching
>> (which I fail to see in the code) such that it's O(N) sometimes but much
>> faster other times (and if so, what are the cases that are sped up)?
>
> There's no caching.  I guess find_newline is just slow compared to
> display_count_lines?  (How many of these functions do we have in the C
> layer, anyway?)

Oh, I see that find_newline has a lot of caching going on, and the logic
isn't...  quite...  obvious.  I guess it's possible there may be cases
where the new implementation is slower, then?  I'm not sure how to
measure that, though -- it takes 10x more time to call the old
`line-number-at-pos' ten times, so if the function is supposed to cache
something, it's not doing that.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no