Re: redisplay system of emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> In fact, the size of the total document should not affect editing
> speed.  And we are not just talking "editing" or fixed documents here:
> run-off compilation/log output needs to be fast.

That's the ideal goal, yes.  And Emacs is hopefully closer to it than
web browsers.  But Emacs is definitely not there in general: in some
cases (fundamental-mode, no line-number-mode, ...), it's mostly
there, but once you add enough font-locking and stuff, document size
does matter.  So we end up only caring about "fast enough on oldish
hardware when editing fairly large documents", and give up on "still
fast even on C header files larger than your memory" (sorry, Alan ;-)


        Stefan