Re: Org mode and Emacs

[Ihor Radchenko]

David Engster <deng@randomsample.de> writes:

>> On my system, using Emacs 28 and latest Org, exporting org-manual +
>> org-guide takes 18.8 sec. This time includes genering the .texi files
>> and running texinfo. From that 18.8 sec, texinfo takes 3.4 sec to run.
>
> On my system, generating org.texi from org.org takes 21s, makeinfo
> org.texi takes 2.7s. But it's nice to see that it has become much faster
> compared to 2014.

Can you test the latest Org main?

>> org export takes: 15.4 sec, which is 4.5 x texinfo time.
>> Considering that Org export is more sofisticated compared to texinfo and
>> that Org export is written in Elisp, I see this performance as
>> acceptable for a documentation system.
>
> Why does the implementation language matter whether a documentation
> system is acceptable? And while sophisticated, Org is actually still
> missing features (like a proper index) to be a suitable replacement.

Well. It was a rather hand-waving argument: Elisp is not as fast of many
other programming languages. So software written in Elisp may be slow
despite the best effort. etc etc

In any case, that argument is futile now. I managed to get Org export
work as fast as texinfo.

As for proper index, we do support index for texinfo export
specifically and for publishing websites. A more general-purpose index
support is in the works. See https://github.com/tecosaur/org-glossary

> Org is about 1/16th of the whole Emacs documentation, so we're looking
> at over 5min if everything was written in Org, give or take. People were
> already up in arms when the switch from Texinfo v4 to v5 was done (which
> switched to a Perl implementation). When documentation generation takes
> a long time, writing it becomes more painful, as you cannot quickly
> check the resulting output. And I think you underestimate how important
> a quick build process is. Apart from developer annoyance, you need less
> resources for CI, for instance.

Fair point.

Best,
Ihor