is speed a concern?

Julian Bradfield writes: Yes. Note that any linear algorithm with non-sequential buffer accesses reduces to quadratic, unless you are quite lucky with position cache hits. I'm pretty sure this hits us hard in code that keeps multiple objects in unsorted order in a buffer (VM mail folders after threading) and probably also in the extents code (the "wrap the whole buffer in an extent and watch XEmacs sink slowly slowly in the quicksand" phenomenon). We don't. We currently support only the variable width format, and it does slow things up, I believe. The code that looks like it supports multiple buffer formats in theory could, but the alternative formats have never been implemented. The low-level variable-width code itself is quite tricky and I would like to be able to simplify it by deoptimizing it. But for that we'll need to have a reasonable alternative such as 8- and 16-bit buffers. In VM, I run into serious slowness every day; I'd like to just keep all my VM folders as single files, but it's just not reasonable once you get past about 20MB. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta