Re: [PATCH] ob-tangle.el: Speed up tangling

[Tom Gillespie <tgbugs@gmail.com>]

Hi Sébastien,
   Some comments while looking over this (will report back when I have
tested it out as well). This is a section of the ob export
functionality that I have been looking for on and off for quite a
while because it is responsible for some bad and insecure behavior. I
think that some of your changes may have fixed/improved this as a side
effect. I don't know whether it is worth doing anything about the
issues in this patch, but since we are here, I think they are worth
mentioning. All of the issues that I'm aware of are related to what
happens if tangling fails part way through the process. First, your
patch already fixes a major issue which is that the modes of all files
would not be set if any one of them failed to tangle. Next, during the
process the existing file is deleted prior to tangling, which means
that it cannot be restored if tangling fails, it would be better if
the old file was moved to a temporary location and then deleted on
success or replaced on failure. This likely requires wrapping the bits
that can fail in unwind-protect and restoring on failure or fully
deleting at the end of success. The next issue is that setting the
tangle mode should happen before the file is written, an empty file
should be created, the mode should then be set, the contents of the
file should be written only after the mode has been set. This involves
a bit of reordering of operations in lines 124-126 of your patch. This
ordering of opertions prevents security issues related to race
conditions and potential errors being evoked during write-region
(though again, your changes already make the tangling code much more
secure by setting the modes on each file immediately after writing
instead of how it works currently where if any other block encounters
an error then no modes were set). Best!
Tom

On Sun, Apr 18, 2021 at 12:23 AM Sébastien Miquel
<sebastien.miquel@posteo.eu> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> The attached patch modifies the ~org-babel-tangle~ function to avoid a
> quadratic behavior in the number of blocks tangled to a single file.
>
> Tangling an org buffer with 200 blocks to 5 different files yields a
> 25 % speedup.
>
>
> * lisp/ob-tangle.el (org-babel-tangle-collect-blocks): Group
> collected blocks by tangled file name.
> (org-babel-tangle): Avoid quadratic behavior in number of blocks.
>
> --
> Sébastien Miquel