Re: Compiling Elisp to a native code with a GCC plugin

[Stefan Monnier]

> So you end up with
> (or (looking-at "foo ") (search-forward "\nfoo "))
> which creates a regexp, anyway, and seems clumsy.

Unless the text you match is short, the above is probably the fastest, indeed.
There is no built-in support for the above idiom, OTOH, so you have to
pay for the extra Elisp interpretation overhead of calling looking-at
and then search-forward.

> So what I wonder is whether there is a smarter way to do this, in
> general.  (I'm assuming that a simple string search is faster than a
> regexp search, but I've never actually benchmarked this.)

A simple string search is indeed faster and uses one of those algorithms
that are faster for longer search strings.


        Stefan