DConf 2013 Day 3 Talk 1: Metaprogramming in the Real World by Don Clugston

[Walter Bright]

On 6/13/2013 2:22 AM, Peter Alexander wrote:
> The syntax highlighting has actually bogged down vim for me in the past. I had a
> file with a large array in it (hundreds of lines), and scrolling over those
> lines caused vim to stutter at about 1fps.

Back in the Bad Old DOS days, I had trouble with that with my text editor. The 
solution was to implement cooperative multitasking, where the computation of the 
display was disconnected from the command processing. The display computation 
would regularly check to see if it was obsolete, and start over if it was. 
Command handling always preempted. It worked like a champ, making the editor 
nice and crisp.