bug#45379: 28.0.50; Degraded Performance of describe-buffer-bindings

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> It turns out that we were doing unnecessary looping due to the above
>> mentioned commit.  While working on this, I also found that we can get
>> rid of an unnecessary call to char_table_ref_and_range, which should
>> make this function run even faster.
>
> I'm not sure I understand the reasons for each of the changes here.
> char-tables are a tricky data structure, so I'd like to make sure this
> change doesn't make our code subtly incorrect.

Thanks.

I have been struggling to come up with good unit tests, so any ideas
about that would also be very welcome.

> So could you please walk us through the proposed changes, adding
> explanations for each part as you go?

Yes.  Please allow for at least a couple of days to write this up.

> (And what do char-tables have to do with describing key bindings,
> btw?)

Full keymaps are char-tables, while sparse keymaps are just lists.

The call stack looks like this:

Fdescribe_buffer_bindings [keymap.c]
-> describe-map-tree      [help.el]
-> describe-map
-> Fhelp__describe_vector [keymap.c]
-> describe_vector