Re: State of the overlay tree branch?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> If lsp-mode/lsp-ui needs a fast line counter, one can easily be
>> provided by exposing find_newline to Lisp.  IME, it's lightning-fast,
>> and should run circles around count-lines (used by line-number-at-pos).
> Having a fast line counter in Elisp would be terrific.

It should be pretty easy to provide such a thing by relying on a cache
of the last call.  Tho Sebastian's experience seems to indicate that the
current code doesn't only suffer from the time to count LF but also from
the time to process the markers.

I seem to remember someone else experiencing a similar problem and
suggesting that the problem lies in the charpos_to_bytepos (and/or
bytepos_to_charpos) conversion function, which iterates through all the
markers to try and find a "nearby" marker (because markers keep track
of both their bytepos and their charpos).  Looking for a nearby marker
to avoid scanning the whole buffer is a good idea in many cases, but not
if scanning the list of markers takes more time than scanning the
whole buffer.


        Stefan