Re: Transient manual

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: jonas@bernoul.li, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2023 21:15:36 -0400
> 
>   > Texinfo 4.13 is also the final version of Texinfo written in C; it is
>   > several orders of magnitude faster than anything newer.
> 
> Could you give us an real example of the time difference between the
> versions, on a real input job?  That would help us understand the
> impact of this issue.

Current version of makeinfo is about 10 times slower than the one from
Texinfo 4.13 if Perl extensions (written in C as part of Texinfo) are
used, and about 15 to 18 times slower if the extensions are not used
(i.e. only Perl code is used for all the Texinfo-to-Info translation).

Of course, current Texinfo has many features that 4.13 didn't support
and many of them simply could not be supported without a complete
redesign and reimplementation of makeinfo as it was originally
designed.  Its one-pass architecture with conversions performed
in-place on the same input buffer simply made some complex features
impossible to implement.  That design is what made it so
lightning-fast, but also put a limit to its extensibility and
development.