Martín Rincón Botero <martinrinconbot...@gmail.com> writes: > I'm lucky to be able to work using Lilypond through Python. I never > compile the whole score I'm working on, but only the current "segment" > (around 2 pages) and the corresponding pages get updated in the > PDF. Compiling the whole thing is something I do only at the end of a > project because it's so slow (I believe TeX suffers from similar > problems, so mentioning TeX doesn't really improve the situation).
TeX was written to make efficient use of computers with a power that would be considered absolutely ridiculously impaired by today's standards, so it tends to be amazingly blazingly fast. Any differing impression most likely due is to abusing TeX as a Turing machine for solving more or less generic programming purposes rather than as a typesetting engine with a basic macro layer. Since TeX is predominantly employed for compiling LaTeX sources, that speaks more about the LaTeX implementation than TeX itself. To wit: in ancient times, using \tracingall for looking at how a document got compiled tended to deliver useful information; nowadays it just puts out indecipherable riffraff, like using gdb for tracing the progress of a Scheme interpreter does. A Texinfo rather than LaTeX compilation is probably more in line with the expected performance (at least for input not transcending the ASCII input plane of Unicode) but no promises: the old adage "any improvements in hardware performance will get eaten up by more waste in programming" is a universal phenomenon. -- David Kastrup
