bug#8890: 23.3; message writing slows emacs

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> If it's been less than (say) 50th of a second since the previous
>> message, then don't message anything.  However, set up a timer in a
>> 100th of a second's time to display that message -- if nothing else has
>> been displayed in the mean time.
>
> That's much too tricky to implement.  Making it reliable is going to
> be painful.

Is it getting a timer to work that's tricky?

> Much easier to allow progress-reporter-update to output non-percentage
> messages (e.g. for bytecomp, the changing part is not a percentage but
> a function name).

If we're not going to make `message' just behave, then a function pair
like `message-maybe' (which wouldn't output anything that arrives too
fast) and a `message-flush' (to say that we're finished with the dubious
messaging) might do the trick.

That doesn't work very well with nested regions of dubious messaging, of
course, but that's probably not very common.

-- 
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  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/