Re: utf8 and emacs text/string multibyte representation

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Yet setting string elements can trigger reallocations/memmove
>> operations.
> Emacs, as every editor, needs to handle this efficiently anyway,
> because editing operations rarely leave the buffer size unchanged.  So
> Emacs uses a gap to minimize reallocations.

To clarify: Emacs handles modification of strings naively
(reallocate+memmove), but it doesn't matter much because these are
almost never used (my own local Emacs actually completely disallows
them, and I very rarely bump into problems because of it).  All "string
modifications" instead take place in buffers where we can efficiently
insert/delete/replace text.


        Stefan