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Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

code.visualstudio.com

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

#21
post #19

(Syntax highlighting) is the one feature that turns a text editor into a code editor. Syntax highlighting is eye candy. Automatic indentation is what turns a text editor into a code editor.

Automatic indentation saves a few keystrokes. A languages service (go to definition, etc) is what turns a text editor into a code editor!

Re: Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

#22
post #19

(Syntax highlighting) is the one feature that turns a text editor into a code editor. Syntax highlighting is eye candy. Automatic indentation is what turns a text editor into a code editor.

Automatic indentation saves a few keystrokes. A languages service (go to definition, etc) is what turns a text editor into a code editor!

A language service is for people with poor memory. A terminal window is what turns a text editor into a code editor.

Re: Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

#23
post #5

Shameless plug: my implementation of Sublime's syntax highlighting engine in Rust has similar optimizations and more. I'm not at my computer to benchmark on the same files but it should be >2x as fast as their "after" numbers just based on lines/second for JS-like files. This evening I'm even trying to port it to a pure Rust regex engine that should eliminate non-Rust code and make it substantially faster. It also im…

Thanks for this. Clearly the original post describes good work, but I can't help feeling the JS community is slacking off when it comes to performance.

Just eyeballing the cited numbers, they take 3939ms to handle a 1.18MB input on "a somewhat powerful desktop machine". Assuming that that means a chip running at 2GHz, we're talking about over 6300 cycles per byte!

That's quite frankly ridiculous. An improvement by at least one order of magnitude should be possible. Where's the ambition?

(Yes, there's always a trade-off with these things. But I feel someone has to point this out when the OP is explicitly about getting kudos for performance work.)

Re: Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

#25
post #24

So VSCode is great in many ways, and the article might be interesting. But I would never call it fast. It's still really really slow. Just see this comparision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDRBxtEUOFE

The article only makes the claim that they have made it faster that the previous technique. Most people say VSCode is faster than other electron editors like Atom. I am not sure who has said that VSCode is faster than Vim and it would be safe to assume that Vim would be faster.

Re: Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

#26
post #5

Shameless plug: my implementation of Sublime's syntax highlighting engine in Rust has similar optimizations and more. I'm not at my computer to benchmark on the same files but it should be >2x as fast as their "after" numbers just based on lines/second for JS-like files. This evening I'm even trying to port it to a pure Rust regex engine that should eliminate non-Rust code and make it substantially faster. It also im…

Thanks for this. Clearly the original post describes good work, but I can't help feeling the JS community is slacking off when it comes to performance. Just eyeballing the cited numbers, they take 3939ms to handle a 1.18MB input on "a somewhat powerful desktop machine". Assuming that that means a chip running at 2GHz, we're talking about over 6300 cycles per byte! That's quite frankly ridiculous. An improvement by at…

The dynamic languages people are always saying programmer time is more important than computer time. Yet they put out an editor that is wasteful with both.

Re: Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

#27
post #17
post #5

Shameless plug: my implementation of Sublime's syntax highlighting engine in Rust has similar optimizations and more. I'm not at my computer to benchmark on the same files but it should be >2x as fast as their "after" numbers just based on lines/second for JS-like files. This evening I'm even trying to port it to a pure Rust regex engine that should eliminate non-Rust code and make it substantially faster. It also im…

Sorry but I'm not familiar with Rust -- is it possible to run your lib in all platforms in a Node environment? And, do you have an issue for the regex port? Would love to see the benchmark.

Yes it would be possible to write a C wrapper for my Rust library and link that from Node, however I expect you might lose a lot of performance to data conversion.

I have yet to do the regex engine port, I'm doing that later this evening. I'm porting it from Oniguruma to https://github.com/google/fancy-regex which accelerates common types of regexes using the awesome Rust regex crate which is super fast.

Re: Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

#28
post #7
post #2

> there is no feasible way to interpret TextMate grammars in the browser even today That doesn't sound right... but then again I don't know enough about TextMate grammars to argue.

- all the regular expressions in TM grammars are based on oniguruma, a regular expression library written in C. - the only way to interpret the grammars and get anywhere near original fidelity is to use the exact same regular expression library (with its custom syntax constructs) in VSCode, our runtime is node.js and we can use a node native module that exposes the library to JavaScript - in the Monaco Editor, we are…

Is there a reason the oniguruma syntax can't be translated into other regexes? It'd require a fairly feature-rich engine since oniguruma supports practically everything, but is Chrome missing something fundamental that can't be mimicked? E.g. [::alpha::] could be converted to [a-zA-Z] or the UTF equivalent (though I doubt this particular one is a problem).

Re: Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

#29
post #5

Shameless plug: my implementation of Sublime's syntax highlighting engine in Rust has similar optimizations and more. I'm not at my computer to benchmark on the same files but it should be >2x as fast as their "after" numbers just based on lines/second for JS-like files. This evening I'm even trying to port it to a pure Rust regex engine that should eliminate non-Rust code and make it substantially faster. It also im…

Thanks for this. Clearly the original post describes good work, but I can't help feeling the JS community is slacking off when it comes to performance. Just eyeballing the cited numbers, they take 3939ms to handle a 1.18MB input on "a somewhat powerful desktop machine". Assuming that that means a chip running at 2GHz, we're talking about over 6300 cycles per byte! That's quite frankly ridiculous. An improvement by at…

It's harder than it sounds if you want to support many languages. The Sublime syntaxes repo I use has 34,000 lines of grammars whereas my engine is only 3000 lines of code. If you count all the tmLanguage files for nice languages available online it's probably hundreds of thousands of lines, and that's in a pretty dense format. The whole point of using tmLanguage files is that people don't care about how fast other languages are if there is no highlighting for their language.

I could get way better performance by rewriting all those grammars using compiled parsers in Rust (like Xi has as an option https://github.com/google/xi-editor/blob/master/rust/lang/Ca...) but it would take an absurd amount of effort.

The speed of highlighting tmLanguage files is limited mostly by the regex library. My code spends 50% of its time in Oniguruma. You can improve that a bit by using a fancy regex engine, which is how Sublime is faster than my engine, but this evening I'm going to try to port my library to a faster engine based on Rust's regex crate. But that library (https://github.com/google/fancy-regex) is brand new and almost untested. It's the only open source library that is faster than Oniguruma while supporting all the right features. In the future VSCode may be able to gain some speed by switching to it, but they have much more overhead over the regex library to eat away first than I do.

Re: Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting

#30
post #2

> there is no feasible way to interpret TextMate grammars in the browser even today That doesn't sound right... but then again I don't know enough about TextMate grammars to argue.

What I don't understand is why do we still use TextMate grammars.

Can anyone explain why this is the case? It's not only in VSCode, I remember seeing something about TextMate grammars also in other editors.

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