Re: sluggish behavior in cperl-mode on a large file (included)

[bkuhn@ebb.org (Bradley M. Kuhn)]

>> I am running emacs-snapshot from debian, dated 2006-12-18.  

>> I have noticed that editing it is extremely slow in cperl-mode with
>> font-lock on.

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> Not directly answering your question or addressing your problem: have
> you tried to use plain perl-mode instead?  In Emacs-22, it does much
> better syntax-highlighting that in Emacs-21, pretty close to what
> cperl-mode does.

I noticed that perl-mode has gotten a lot better, but I am unfortunately
used to a lot of things that I get from cperl-mode.  (For example, I
prefer its default indenting behavior to that of perl's mode, and I like
some fo the construct auto completion stuff).  For the moment, the work
around you suggest is what I'm using for those files I have with lots of
large heredoc-strings.

Someone on #emacs suggested that maybe a "new regex engine" in Emacs 22
was to blame.  This seemed like a bit dubious to me, but I thought I'd
mention it.  The profiler clearly is spending a lot of time finding and
doing the fontify-ing of various constructs, and the most time seems to be
spent on things that are particular long (like heredoc strings).

   -- bkuhn