A recent r/emacs thread[1] discussed the long standing[2][3]
issue of Emacs performing horribly on very long lines.

In summary, it seems that it might be possible to significantly
improve performance by altering Emacs' display engine to use simpler
techniques at cost of increased maintenance for the extra code that
will be needed, and the loss of some display capability.
I encourage reading the original thread for details.

To me it seems that the aforementioned loss of display capabilities
is not relevant to terminal Emacs, as it doesn't have those capabilities
in the first place.  So none of the objections apply except those
regarding extra maintenance and the effort to make this work.

In the case of gui Emacs, the reduction of display capability is real,
but it seems prefereable to freezing Emacs or slowing it down to a crawl.
It also seems better than, or at least a viable alternative to, opening
files with M-x find-file-literally, which loses font-lock and leaves
the buffer stuck in Fundamental mode.

In the r/emacs thread I was encouraged to post to emacs-dev to get
the input of more developers, so here I am.

I had three other ideas, which I did not yet have a chance to mention
in the thread.

First is that Emacs could have a user-configurable timeout after which
it could warn the user that it's taking an unexpectedly long time to
open a file (or find the end of a line) and ask whether to abort,
continue trying, or drop down to a mode with reduced display
capabilities (which could be either the equivalent of
find-file-literally or the above simplified display techniques, if
they're implemented).

The second idea is to use to ignore anything that would slow Emacs
down while doing a simple count of the line length, and if the line
length so far is over a certain threshold to ask the same questions as
above about aborting, continuing, or dropping down to a fail-safe
mode.

The third is to use some of Emacs' new async abilities to try to open
the file.  It might still take forever to open, but at least it shouldn't
freeze all of Emacs in the meantime.

Any thoughts?

[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/9qtpak/what_would_it_take_to_make_emacs_perform_well_on/

[2] - https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=13675

[3] - https://github.com/codygman/figure-out-emacs-long-lines-issue/blob/master/figuring-out-emacs-display-issues.org