Re: (describe-function 'self-insert-command) takes too long

[Kim F. Storm]

"Drew Adams" <address@hidden> writes:

>     There is no noticeable delay even for commands bound to a few
>     dozen keys, but self-insert-command is bound to zillions of
>     them. It is essentially a special case that needs to be treated
>     as such, or else, as I say, the list of keys should be computed
>     only up to some limit.
>
> Some more info on this, FYI: In my build, on my machine, measuring using
> this (thanks, Lennart) gives 0.701 seconds (IIUC):

So what is the problem?  How often do you ask that same question?

Even if it took 2-3 seconds, I don't see the importance of fixing this.



> Doing the same thing for command `forward-char' gives 0.05 seconds:
>
> => (17713 7521 950000) (17713 7521 960000)
>
> That's an order of magnitude difference (factor of 14). And 0.7 seconds
> renders this essentially non-interactive, especially when combined with the
> possible overhead of other processing (e.g. calling describe-function from
> another command).

Huh?  Who would do that (more than once)?

If you have code which (senselessly) calls describe-function for
self-insert-command, maybe you could do the clever part...


> Besides, all of that processing time is simply wasted, 

My computer spends more time in the idle loop than anything else,
no matter how fast I throw commands at it.
I think I can spare 0.7 seconds.

>                                                        since the calculated
> key bindings are just thrown away, replaced by the "many ordinary text
> characters" help. The code should be smarter than that.

I don't see why!

And anything smarter could mean that it would have to know something
in advance - and how can it do that?

You cannot just modify describe-function to always say "many ordinary
chars"; for self-insert-command, as the user may actually rebind all
chars to something else!

IMO, there is no problem here.

-- 
Kim F. Storm <address@hidden> http://www.cua.dk