Re: Dynamic loading progress

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2015 10:28:13 +0100
> From: Aurélien Aptel <aurelien.aptel+emacs@gmail.com>
> Cc: Emacs development discussions <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> > I still need to implement the lexer level, which will either need to
> > call the current elisp lexer, or access the buffer text directly.
> 
> No buffer or string access yet, sorry. I guess you can work around it
> by retrieving each character as an int but that's neither practical
> nor efficient.

Actually, most accesses to buffer text do precisely that: access one
character at a time.  The API typically accepts the buffer position.
Why do you think this is inefficient?

If we think modules will need to access lexical units, we might
provide APIs for that, although I expect this to be complicated, due
to the different semantics of what a "word" etc. is, buffer-local
syntax tables, and other complications.

Direct access to buffer text as a C array is also a possibility, but
modules that do that will have to handle the gap, and also cope with
buffer relocation (on platforms that use ralloc.c).