Re: Automatic (e)tags generation and incremental updates

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 13.01.2021 17:01, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Cc: tom@tromey.com, john@yates-sheets.org, philipk@posteo.net,
> >   emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> > Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2021 00:26:50 +0200
> >
> > Anyway, if you have any suggestions regarding how to write the file
> > quicker (and why utf-8-emacs coding didn't help), that would be great.
>
> Almost all the identifiers are ASCII, right?  So maybe optimize 99.9%
> of use cases by storing such tags tables in a unibyte buffer, read
> with insert-file-contents-literally?

All right, and that option is probably handled well enough already by 
the user choosing (l) in the prompt when the tags file is very big.

> As for why utf-8-emacs didn't help: I'm not really sure why Stefan
> thought it will.  I mean, look at the code: it still encodes, just
> differently.

My (apparently faulty) intuition was that if utf-8-emacs is the memory 
representation of buffer text, converting it into that encoding can be 
faster because it could be done by copying from memory rather that 
having to do the work of recoding every character.