Re: redisplay system of emacs

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
> ?? Of course Mozilla supports these kind of things too.

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

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.

I think this difference in approach makes sense given the different
goals of the two applications, and it's not at all clear that Mozilla's
display engine would work well for Emacs too.

Of course, you could try it and see.... :|

-miles

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