Hello everyone!

Couple of days ago I submitted a question to Stackoverflow regarding an
adequate way to handle many (thousands, that is) overlays. I wanted to know
if there are any alternatives to using overlays (which is slow) for cases
similar to mine. To make a long story short, I am building a generalized
incremental tokenizer, details can be read on Stackoverflow (
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25915908/best-way-to-save-lots-of-position-pairs-in-emacs-lisp).

It turns out that the only viable alternative to overlays is using text
properties, and text properties were not meant for the purpose. All I need
is an ability to save position pairs, the positions should survive text
insertion/deletion and there should be a way to find those pairs given a
buffer point. Overlay interface is perfect (consider overlays-at,
overlays-in and the dynamic (re-)positioning system).

After answering my question Stefan (Monnier?) mentioned that overlay
behavior can be fixed from N^2 to N*logN, which would make them
asymptotically equivalent to text properties; adding that he has no time to
implement the fix.

I believe that given some time, a few tips from experienced Emacs
developers and enough coffee I can at least try to fulfil the task. I am
not in a hurry, and wanted to get into Emacs internals anyway.

What do you think?

PS I already have my Cedet/Emacs FSF papers signed - sent a minor patch to
Cedet some time ago.

-- 
Yours sincerely,


Vladimir Kazanov


--
С уважением,

Владимир Казанов