30 Oct
2011
30 Oct
'11
12:12 p.m.
>> Grepping the source tree.
> In fact, it's a *perfect* illustration of how a fast machine can
> conceal a very inefficient design! Grepping a source tree for an
> identifier is orders of magnitude more wasteful than simply using an
> inverted index.
Yes - but that's ignoring the cost of creating/maintaining the index in
the first place. If you grep the tree less often than you make changes
that would require updating the index, it may be cheaper to pay the
cost at grep time rather than at index rebuild/update time.
Do you have any examples of software that does this
sort of indexing
that's not built into a heavyweight IDE? I've never seen any.
ctags(1). It's not a full index (it's definitions-only, for example),
but I think it's close enough to count.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B