bug#33653: 27.0.50; Change Gnus obarrays-as-hash-tables into real hash tables

[Eric Abrahamsen]

On 12/11/18 20:23 PM, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>>> Here's the next thing: turning Gnus' obarrays-as-hash-tables into real
>>> hash tables. Gnus currently stores information about groups by coercing
>>> group names to unibyte, interning them in custom obarrays, and then
>>> setting their symbol-value to whatever value needs to be stored. I think
>>> all this was written before Emacs had actual hash tables.
>>
>> Also hounding Lars for his opinion...
>
> Using real hash tables sounds nice, if there's no negative performance
> impact.

Cool! In fact it seems to be a hair faster.

If you have a moment for this, would you look at the second commit in
the scratch/gnus-hashtables branch? The first commit seems fairly
stable, but the second has to do with encoding -- if group names never
need to be unibyte, it should be possible to leave them decoded inside
Gnus itself.

Besides active files and server communication, are there any other
places where group names would need to be encoded?

Thanks,
Eric