>>>>> "Jaime" == Jaime E Villate <villate at gnu.org> writes:
[snip]
>> For the moment, the user interface is the same as before
>> (i.e. user sees a list of items and chooses some).
Jaime> It would be nice to be able to use more of the functionalities of
Jaime> the info format. For example, if I look at the documentation using
Jaime> the info program, I can navigate through the sections tree, search
Jaime> for a keyword in the index, etc., and I think that program is fairly
Jaime> fast.
I've never found describe to be annoyingly slow. I don't remember the
details very well anymore, but the major cost of describe was reading
in the index file for the first call to describe. Once that was done,
describe was reasonably fast (< 1 sec) for each call. I think the
cost there was having to compile up the regex that was used to search
for the desired item. Clisp has a very fast compiler so you didn't
notice this. CMUCL was a bit slower and noticeable. GCL was very
slow, but I thought gcl uses its own info package instead of
cl-info. (I think.)
Ray