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[emacs.git] / src / region-cache.h
blobb4a0b646a34dbbd2877fb7ee1e3f502fe3d7a982
1 /* Header file: Caching facts about regions of the buffer, for optimization.
2 Copyright (C) 1985, 1986, 1993, 1995 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
6 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
7 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
8 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
9 any later version.
11 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
12 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
13 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
14 GNU General Public License for more details.
16 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
17 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to
18 the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
19 Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. */
22 /* This code was written by Jim Blandy <jimb@cs.oberlin.edu> to help
23 GNU Emacs better support the gene editor written for the University
24 of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne's Ribosome Database Project (RDP).
26 Emacs implements line operations (finding the beginning/end of the
27 line, vertical motion, all the redisplay stuff) by searching for
28 newlines in the buffer. Usually, this is a good design; it's very
29 clean to just represent the buffer as an unstructured string of
30 characters, and the lines in most files are very short (less than
31 eighty characters), meaning that scanning usually costs about the
32 same as the overhead of maintaining some more complicated data
33 structure.
35 However, some applications, like gene editing, make use of very
36 long lines --- on the order of tens of kilobytes. In such cases,
37 it may well be worthwhile to try to avoid scanning, because the
38 scans have become two orders of magnitude more expensive. It would
39 be nice if this speedup could preserve the simplicity of the
40 existing data structure, and disturb as little of the existing code
41 as possible.
43 So here's the tack. We add some caching to the scan_buffer
44 function, so that when it searches for a newline, it notes that the
45 region between the start and end of the search contained no
46 newlines; then, the next time around, it consults this cache to see
47 if there are regions of text it can skip over completely. The
48 buffer modification primitives invalidate this cache.
50 (Note: Since the redisplay code needs similar information on
51 modified regions of the buffer, we can use the code that helps out
52 redisplay as a guide to where we need to add our own code to
53 invalidate our cache. prepare_to_modify_buffer seems to be the
54 central spot.)
56 Note that the cache code itself never mentions newlines
57 specifically, so if you wanted to cache other properties of regions
58 of the buffer, you could use this code pretty much unchanged. So
59 this cache really holds "known/unknown" information --- "I know
60 this region has property P" vs. "I don't know if this region has
61 property P or not." */
64 /* Allocate, initialize and return a new, empty region cache. */
65 struct region_cache *new_region_cache P_ ((void));
67 /* Free a region cache. */
68 void free_region_cache P_ ((struct region_cache *));
70 /* Assert that the region of BUF between START and END (absolute
71 buffer positions) is "known," for the purposes of CACHE (e.g. "has
72 no newlines", in the case of the line cache). */
73 extern void know_region_cache P_ ((struct buffer *BUF,
74 struct region_cache *CACHE,
75 int START, int END));
77 /* Indicate that a section of BUF has changed, to invalidate CACHE.
78 HEAD is the number of chars unchanged at the beginning of the buffer.
79 TAIL is the number of chars unchanged at the end of the buffer.
80 NOTE: this is *not* the same as the ending position of modified
81 region.
82 (This way of specifying regions makes more sense than absolute
83 buffer positions in the presence of insertions and deletions; the
84 args to pass are the same before and after such an operation.) */
85 extern void invalidate_region_cache P_ ((struct buffer *BUF,
86 struct region_cache *CACHE,
87 int HEAD, int TAIL));
89 /* The scanning functions.
91 Basically, if you're scanning forward/backward from position POS,
92 and region_cache_forward/backward returns true, you can skip all
93 the text between POS and *NEXT. And if the function returns false,
94 you should examine all the text from POS to *NEXT, and call
95 know_region_cache depending on what you find there; this way, you
96 might be able to avoid scanning it again. */
98 /* Return true if the text immediately after POS in BUF is known, for
99 the purposes of CACHE. If NEXT is non-zero, set *NEXT to the nearest
100 position after POS where the knownness changes. */
101 extern int region_cache_forward P_ ((struct buffer *BUF,
102 struct region_cache *CACHE,
103 int POS,
104 int *NEXT));
106 /* Return true if the text immediately before POS in BUF is known, for
107 the purposes of CACHE. If NEXT is non-zero, set *NEXT to the nearest
108 position before POS where the knownness changes. */
109 extern int region_cache_backward P_ ((struct buffer *BUF,
110 struct region_cache *CACHE,
111 int POS,
112 int *NEXT));