[slime-devel] Faster output

[Luke Gorrie]

Helmut Eller <e9626484 at stud3.tuwien.ac.at> writes:

> Hi, 
> 
> I've added some code to send the output for *slime-output* across a
> dedicated network stream.  This is quite a bit faster, but the main
> advantage is that Emacs remains more responsive if we get a lot of
> output from the Lisp.  This was particularly problematic with XEmacs.
> The drawback is that this scheme bypasses the state machine and the
> added complexity for the second channel.  Also, this isn't a true
> solution but only hides the problem.

Where does the speed come from?

Raymond Toy had reported the inefficiency that all output from Lisp
ends up getting logged in the *slime-events* buffer, which is fairly
expensive because of hideshow-mode + font-lock-mode.

If the main win from the dedicated connection is just to bypass that,
it could be simpler to hack `slime-log-event' to ignore output
messages (or just drastically abbreviate them).

Possibly the whole event-logging thing should be made optional, though
I'm loathe to remove debugging information from the default setup if
it can be optimised instead.

-Luke