Re: Linking Emacs with libxml2

[Chad Brown]

On Sep 6, 2010, at 8:21 AM, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:
>  (Parsing HTML from Emacs Lisp is rather slow.)

Do you have a feel for how much slower the elisp-based parsing is?  Is it 
causing noticeable delays in Gnus, for example?

> Has this been discussed before and rejected?  It seems like an obvious
> idea, and would enable both easier extraction of data from HTML files,
> as well as writing a (simple) HTML renderer in Emacs Lisp.

The various legal hurdles/barriers impeding dynamic library use in emacs are 
(mostly?) overcome, and this seems like a fine potential candidate.  I suspect 
that ideally we'd have lisp calls that would call a library parser if available 
and an elisp parser if not.  What do you think we'd want (in terms of 
speed/convenience tradeoff) in addition to parse-html?  I'd guess that we'd 
like to be able to parse both a named file and a buffer (but perhaps working on 
buffers would lose us the speed of the library?).

I can't totally commit to building anything, but I'm interested in the dynamic 
library interface to emacs (interested but not yet knowledgable), and I might 
be able to put some time into helping out.

*Chad