Content from 2021-11
Editing abstraction not text (updated)
posted on 2021-11-29 10:24:59
So I started off writing a text editor that would suit my needs: being fully extensible via a scripting language and performant. Along the way I devised an improvement on the piece-table which significantly outperforms all existing similar data structures to my knowledge. There was a small caveat to my particular implementation - it exploited the fact that codepoint and line number tracking are not crucial in the backend of a text editor (details in paper), meaning much of the file did not need to be read with expensive system calls, instead lazily loaded by the operating system's virtual memory subsystem.
Arguably at that point my implementation was not exactly comparable to others since I was no longer providing the same abstract interface as typical text buffers. But the key insight is that bytes, codepoints and lines are simply not the units in which we percieve code.
When designing a development environment, I think a good premise is that not everything is text, just as not everything is a file.
Unless otherwise credited all material 
by plisp 