Re: redisplay system of emacs

[Paul R <paul.r.ml@gmail.com>]

Hello,

> Note that mozilla's display engine makes some dramatically different
> assumptions about what is important for the display engine to do.


I found a related discussion in a previous thread, mid-2009 :

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-07/threads.html#00344


As many emacs youngsters, I feel that emacs really uses too much
home-made code. Surprisingly, Emacs does not benefit that much from the
free software ecosystem. This is certainly connected to the fact that it
has been ahead of its time in many aspects, so it had to build its own
bricks without waiting for others to provide them. But in the meantime
some things has changed, high quality generic free software fragments
has entered the game. Entrusting them rather than home-made code would
certainly be a big job, but would instantly enlarge emacs (indirect)
contributors list.


> Most importantly, it does the layout and display calculation for the
> _entire page_ at once. Emacs, by contrast does it on the fly for the
> small amount being displayed at the moment.

> Mozilla's method allows some nice things -- for instance it makes much
> more complicated layout tractable -- but it really really sucks for
> huge files, and in general probably isn't such a good idea if the
> document tends to change a lot in real time. Emacs' method, by
> contrast works really well for those cases.

The performance of those engines has gotten surprisingly good, and is
still improving at a very fast rate. I would be interested to have some
real-case benchmarks. In the meantime I pasted the whole wikipedia
article into http://ckeditor.com/demo then edited some text in the
middle of the page. It was not blazing fast to be honnest, but still
usable on my 10 years old hardware.

-- 
  Paul