Re: redisplay system of emacs

[Lennart Borgman]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Miles Bader <address@hidden> wrote:
> Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:
>> ?? Of course Mozilla supports these kind of things too.
>
> Note that mozilla's display engine makes some dramatically different
> assumptions about what is important for the display engine to do.
>
> Most importantly, it does the layout and display calculation for the
> _entire page_ at once.  Emacs, by contrast does it on the fly for the
> small amount being displayed at the moment.
>
> Mozilla's method allows some nice things -- for instance it makes much
> more complicated layout tractable --


Yes, it is necessary for web files.


> but it really really sucks for huge
> files, and in general probably isn't such a good idea if the document
> tends to change a lot in real time.  Emacs' method, by contrast works
> really well for those cases.


True. I have no idea if Mozilla allows this kind a display handling
too. Maybe it does.


> I think this difference in approach makes sense given the different
> goals of the two applications, and it's not at all clear that Mozilla's
> display engine would work well for Emacs too.
>
> Of course, you could try it and see.... :|


Some rainy day, perhaps...


> -miles
>
> --
> Cat, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when
> things go wrong in the domestic circle.
>