Re: [Help-zile] Lua

[Reuben Thomas]

On 7 July 2011 04:06, Brian Maher <address@hidden> wrote:
>  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/tweak/

Thanks, that's interesting.

> ...and when I investigate Zile's lua branch, it looks like a buffer is
> simply a circular double-linked list of lines, which means most
> operations are O(n) and there is a limit to the size of files that can
> be put into a buffer.

That's right, and that's also true of the C branch. Further, owing to
the way strings work in Lua, things are actually rather worse there.

> What if Zile was changed to use the lazy-loaded btree described in the
> paper about tweak above instead?  Has anyone given that thoughts?

Thanks for that link. I have not thought about that particular
approach, but I am currently working on redoing the buffer model in
the C version (under the "gc" branch). To start with I'm just doing it
as a single string, which sounds terrible, but is mainly a stepping
stone to change to a proper abstract API for the buffer with the
simplest possible implementation.

When that's done, my current plan was to change to the same buffer
representation as Emacs, that is, two strings, one before and one
after point. That is pretty much the same as working with one string,
but amortizes insertion and deletion at point. However, I have been
interested in using a more efficient representation, such as ropes or
B-trees, for some time. That will require a little more abstraction,
but not much.

> Also, I notice the traffic on this list is pretty sparse.  Does that
> mean the number of people using this editor is small?

Most discussion about the development of Zile takes place on the
bug-zile list, but you're right, it's mostly just me working on it. I
believe that there's a modest user community (I get a fairly steady,
though small, trickle of comments, inquiries and bug reports).

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