bug#21077: 24.5; Slow printing in inferior python buffer with python-shell-enable-font-lock

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> As mentioned, font-lock is but one of the parts of Emacs that slow down
>> as lines get longer.
> I'm not all that concerned with things slowing down slightly,

Neither am I.  All the others I care about also end up rendering
Emacs unusable.  They just show up at different times, or start biting
you at different line lengths.

>> In the case of comint modes, rather than disable font-lock we should
>> refrain from font-locking the text after the last \n (since that's the
>> line that keeps getting expanded, so we end up re-font-locking it O(N)
>> times for a line of length N, for a total amount of work of O(N^2)).
>> IIRC I have a similar hack in grep.el or compile.el.
> OK, but unless there are clear plans to fix this soon the default value of
> python-shell-enable-font-lock should be changed to nil until such time as a
> fix is in place.

I disagree.  All comint modes suffer from this problem, AFAIK, and
I don't see why Python programs would be more likely to generate long
lines than programs in other languages.

But yes, I'd really be happy to see some tentative patch along the lines
I outlined above.


        Stefan