Re: In search for an emacs hacker

[Emanuel Berg]

Thibaut Verron wrote:

>>> Another major issue is that syntax highlighting becomes
>>> makes emacs so slow [...]
>>
>> It is known as font lock in the Emacs world and it
>> shouldn't make Emacs slow, again ask for help or do
>> `emacs-report-bug' to get help/hopefully have the
>> issue fixed.
>
> That's a bold statement.

No pun intended ...

> Font lock can involve arbitrarily complicated regular
> expressions (maybe even arbitrary code?), and depending on
> the major mode it can be slow. Typical examples are large
> latex [...] buffers.
>
> The advice to report occurrences as a bug is sound, but if
> it's not a core mode, the bug report should probably be
> addressed to the relevant developers.

There are several modes for LaTeX, I use `tex-mode' which is
"part of GNU Emacs" with "Maintainer: emacs-devel@gnu.org"
(tex-mode.el) and I have never experienced that that makes
Emacs slow.

But in general, put in crazy stuff and all bets are of with
the outcome - it can be crazy as well, even.

However here in particular, I've heard that font-lock is
carried out by the idle timer so in theory it shouldn't be
possible for it to slow down Emacs. But maybe in practice the
idle timer just _executes_ stuff when Emacs is idling and
cannot later preempt it once commenced ...
collaborative/cooperative after all.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal