Re: IRC client for Emacs

[Richard Stallman]

    I think this might be ok, but I'm uncertain whether implementing the hash
    function in elisp is worth the computation time vs. just using C
    hashtables, or whether it's better to memoize results parsed out of the MO
    file into a hashtable for all future references.

Using C hashtables would mean using a lot more space, I would expect.
Saving that space is the reason for reading directly out of the buffer
rather than making an Emacs hash table.  However, this depends on how
much excess space there is in an MO file.  You could do the computation
and see which one saves how much space.

I think we need the code to parse the MO file in any case, regardless
of whether you do this to look up each string or to parse the file
just once to put the data in an Emacs hash table.  So I don't see how
using the Emacs table avoids any code.

Using a hash table to memoize would not add too much space,
and might be worth doing if it really speeds things up.
However, I suspect things will be fast enough without it
so it isn't worth doing.