Re: footnote fontify causing massive slowdown

[Aaron Ecay <aaronecay@gmail.com>]

Hi Nicolas,

2015ko abenudak 5an, Nicolas Goaziou-ek idatzi zuen:
> 
> This is a limitation of our current way to fontify a buffer. Changing it
> implies some serious work, which I'd rather spend on switching to
> syntax-based (instead of regexp-based) fontification.

Indeed.  However, this code was needlessly slow because it failed to
take advantage of short-circuit evaluation.  I pushed a fix in 046310d.

> 
> However, this report raises an interesting question about footnotes:
> should we still support plain (e.g., "[1]") footnotes in Org documents?
> 
> The pattern is very common an regularly introduces false positives.
> Also, IIRC, it was introduced for non-Org buffers (e.g., in Message mode
> buffers), to provide some common features with "footnote.el" library.
> 
> I think we could remove this kind of footnotes, and yet preserve
> `org-footnote-normalize' to change Org footnotes into these ones, for
> foreign documents.
> 
> WDYT?

Do [1]-type footnotes present other performance problems today?  I’d
rather see if simple solutions to those can be effective before going
for a breaking change to syntax.  Then there’s the fact that syntax
fontification (incl. org-elements cache) is going to have such different
performance characteristics I’m not sure we can predict where the
bottlenecks will be.

-- 
Aaron Ecay