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bug#70784: Abolish string resizing
From: |
Mattias Engdegård |
Subject: |
bug#70784: Abolish string resizing |
Date: |
Sun, 5 May 2024 14:33:51 +0200 |
The Elisp ability to resize strings is high-cost, low-benefit, so we should
abolish it.
Strings are performance-critical, and the split allocation (fixed-size metadata
+ variable-size data) and its indirections are not free. This is one reason why
strings are comparatively expensive in Elisp compared to other languages.
With MPS there is even no use for the special-purpose string data defragger in
the current GC.
String resizing occurs in exactly one place: `aset` on strings, and then only
when the mutation alters the string size, in either of two cases:
* When a unibyte string byte is set to a non-byte value (> 255), which also
forces the string to become multibyte.
* When a multibyte string char is set to a char of different length.
String mutation itself is very rare these days, and resizing string mutation
exceptionally so.
Best and simplest would be to just turn resizing `aset` on strings into an
error now. As an alternative, we could start warning about it now and make it
an error in the next release. The (trivial) patches exist.
Note that this is not a proposal for abolishing string mutation in general. For
example, `clear-string` would still work on any string, as would arbitrary
closed mutations on unibyte strings and on ASCII multibyte strings.
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing,
Mattias Engdegård <=
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing, Eli Zaretskii, 2024/05/05
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing, Mattias Engdegård, 2024/05/05
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing, Eli Zaretskii, 2024/05/05
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing, Drew Adams, 2024/05/05
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing, Eli Zaretskii, 2024/05/05
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing, Drew Adams, 2024/05/05
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing, Eli Zaretskii, 2024/05/05
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing, Drew Adams, 2024/05/05
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing, Po Lu, 2024/05/05
- bug#70784: Abolish string resizing, Gerd Möllmann, 2024/05/06