bug#52593: 28.0.90; (thing-at-point thing) has so much overhead since commit 7db376e560448e61485ba054def8c82b21f33d6a

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Kang Niu <isgniuk@gmail.com> writes:

> Maybe an optional arg for thing-at-point is necessary to respect fields?
> As I understand, it should be determined by the user of thing-at-point to get 
> what
> kind of thing at point.
> If the user knows or expects fields in the text, he passes the optional arg.
> If the user just wants the "normal" thing at the point whether there are 
> fields or
> not, he calls it without the opt arg as the old way.

The problem is interoperability between packages.  If a package uses
fields to make the buffer more understandable, then other packages like
symbol-overlay should use those fields automatically without having to
be altered.  And if symbol-overlay says "do use fields", then we're back
to the same performance problems we're already seeing.

Ideally the way to make this work would be to change all the thingatp
functions to do their normal thing, but then see whether there's any
field separators in that area, and if so, recalculate the "thing".

But that would require a big rewrite.

I think at this point, the way forward is to revert this change on
emacs-28 to fix the performance regression, and then open a new bug
report for this.  So I'll do both now.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no