Re: Mysterious fontification/C++ context issue - Patch for beginning-of-defun-raw.

[Stefan Monnier]

> M-> ran almost instantaneously before `beginning-of-defun-raw' changed.
> And you did fill CC Mode's cache already before the change.  I could
> imagine it's because font-locking runs `beginning-of-defun' repeatedly
> for decreasing buffer positions and the `syntax-ppss' cache doesn't
> handle these cases optimally.

I thought "no, can't be, 'cause I was careful to treat this correctly", so
I went and measured it to give a clear proof of it, and much to my surprise
you seemed to be right:

parse-partial-sexp on the whole buffer takes about 0.08 seconds on my laptop
(1.2GHz P-III M, maybe running at 800MHz at that time).  syntax-ppss on that
same buffer takes about 0.24s (about 3 times slower: not great, but seemed
possible), but

           (syntax-ppss (point-max))
           (syntax-ppss (- (point-max) 2000))
           (syntax-ppss (- (point-max) 4000))

takes a good 1.8s which doesn't make any sense.  After the shock (thinking,
god, I was wrong, how could that be?), I realized that these numbers didn't
make any sense.  And sure enough the problem was that in xdisp.c
syntax-begin-function is not nil but set to c-beginning-of-syntax which
doesn't make any sense: if you don't want to use a heuristic, then set the
damn thing to nil.

This variable is set to c-beginning-of-defun in cc-mode.el via
font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function which is set via font-lock-defaults.

Try the patch below,


        Stefan


--- orig/lisp/progmodes/cc-mode.el
+++ mod/lisp/progmodes/cc-mode.el
@@ -597,7 +597,7 @@
                       "font-lock-keywords-2" "font-lock-keywords-3")))
          nil nil
          ,c-identifier-syntax-modifications
-         c-beginning-of-syntax
+         nil
          (font-lock-lines-before . 1)
          (font-lock-mark-block-function
           . c-mark-function)))