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bug#22763: 25.1.50; Feature Request -- A faster method to obtain line nu


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: bug#22763: 25.1.50; Feature Request -- A faster method to obtain line number at position.
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2016 18:06:37 +0200

> Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2016 18:42:52 -0800
> From: Keith David Bershatsky <esq@lawlist.com>
> 
> A while back, I posed a question on emacs.stackexchange.com for a faster 
> method to obtain `line-number-at-pos`.  A user by the name of Constantine 
> came up with `(format-mode-line "%l")`, which is indeed much faster.  I think 
> the draft code below may be just a tad faster, with the added feature of the 
> POS argument.
> 
> http://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/3821/a-faster-method-to-obtain-line-number-at-pos-in-large-buffers
> 
> A user named wasamasa posted a comment: "Be aware that this method will give 
> you "??" for lines exceeding line-number-display-limit-width which is set to 
> a value of 200 per default as I found out here."
> 
> And Stefan posted a comment:  "IIRC the result may also be unreliable if 
> there have been modifications in the buffer since the last redisplay."
> 
> The thread has received 555 hits in the past year, and several have star-ed 
> it and up-voted the question and answer.
> 
> The following is a draft in C based on the existing function 
> `decode_mode_spec` that lets the user input the POS as an argument without 
> the necessity to use `goto-char`.  I'm not sure if it resolves either of the 
> comments above.  The draft is not meant to be a patch per se, because I'm not 
> a programmer and am just beginning my tinkering quest into the language of C. 
>  I have been using it in my own setup for about a week and I haven't seen any 
> ill effects.  It can of course use some TLC by someone more knowledgeable 
> than myself.

This would overwrite the line number and position cached by each
window for redisplay purposes.  I think this is undesirable.  More
importantly, the gotchas pointed out above will still be true, AFAICT.

My suggestion is instead to expose display_count_lines to Lisp via a
simple wrapper (that would need to take care of narrowing and such
likes, something that your proposed API doesn't do, btw).  In my
limited testing I saw a 5- to 10-fold speedup as compared to
line-number-at-pos, when doing that.  I think this is good enough;
applications that need faster massive counting, if there are such
applications, can implement a cache in Lisp and speed this up even
more.

Thanks.





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