On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 09:33:53AM -0700, Charlie Kester wrote: > The problem with linked lists of lines and piece tables has always been > achieving good locality of reference. Not a problem with buffer gap, > where locality was the main motivating factor behind the design.
In my experience, an array of pointers to lines is a very efficient choice, You get O(1) access to any point in the buffer (provided you use <line,column> as coordinates), and in typical code sources lines are reasonably small so that using a single char array for lines is fast enough. Its easy to understand, implement and has excellent performances on non patholical text text. >From my experience with Kakoune, you almost never need the byte-offset of a character, but very often the line,column pair. So using these as basic coordinates (and implementing the buffer backend in consequence) makes much sense.
