New suggestion to make Lilypond speed up on multiple CPU cores

[Arno Waschk]

Hi all,

I know the topic itself is not new, and I am aware that lilypond can't
easily take advantage from multiple CPU cores as the way it "compiles"
lilypond notation into a final pdf file does not allow for it.

But there could be an exception to be used for it: Slicing a (big, of
course, we won't need anything for small ones I think) score along its
pagebreaks, and calculate those (with a "fast mode" option maybe)
independently in parallel, just joining the results for the pdf, or
otherwise very lately after all those layout calculations.

Such page breaks could be inserted by

a) a user manually as he wishes for those anyway

b) a user manually for speed up during writing and proof reading a
score, only removing them for the final result as he does wish for the
perfect lilypond layout when everything else is ready

c) some logic in early parsing stage for automatic speed up when a user
wishes so and is fine about possibly suboptimal page breaking while
writing/proofreading etc.

Sorry if something like that was already suggested, but i did not find such.

If something like this sounds feasible I am happy to invest some of my
time into development, although I would certainly need some help and
guidance into lilypond's code base.

Greetings! Arno