Re: State-machine based syntax highlighting

[Stefan Monnier]

>> > I did a quick search and found this page
>> > http://harmonia.cs.berkeley.edu/harmonia/projects/harmonia-mode/doc/index.html
>> > with a demo xemacs package with syntax highlighting and stuff. Looked
>> > interesting.
>> Interesting.
> I wondered why they supported xemacs only, so I downloaded the source.
> Seems they wrote xemacs extensions in c which have to be compiled into
> xemacs.

> Not a usual way to extend an emacs, but probably advantageous from a
> performance point of view.

> The idea already occured to me that font locking should be implemented
> in pure c in emacs for speed, but I guess it's kind of against the
> extensible editor concept or something.

Actually, font-locking *is* implemented in C.  The elisp part usually takes
a negligible amount of time.  The problem start appearing when the
functionality of the C code is not sufficient and you start trying to parse
the code in elisp, which is slow.


        Stefan