Re: Semantic font-lock for Java

[David Engster]

>     So my guess is the scroll benchmark is simply 17% slower
>    
>     because there are more overlays in the buffer, not because of
>     actual
>     parsing.
>
> Perfect explanation David. Though I'll add that parsing is not
> terribly slow. It's usable. Here's a demo video showcasing the same 
> https://youtu.be/4UcPIdTJLOM .

Note that Semantic will cache the AST between sessions, so if you've
loaded that file before, it will just load the cache.

The time needed for parsing varies wildly between languages. The Java
parser is one of the faster ones, because it's an LALR parser, which is
more efficient than LL (which Semantic uses for C and C++). It is also
very old, and at that time (around Java 1.4 or so) the language was
still very easy to parse (it doesn't support generics, for instance).

-David