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The pp package is great for pretty-printing Emacs Lisp forms, but can be excruciatingly slow for "large" forms.

Is there a general rule-of-thumb for determining whether we should pp a form or not? E.g. if a sequence contains more than X elements, pp would probably be unbearably slow?

I'm not sure what causes the poor performance of pp for "large" forms; that is, I'm not sure what a good definition of "large" is. Is it length? Depth? Some combination of both? What dominates pp time?

Tianxiang Xiong
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  • Define "too slow". It all depends on what you want/need, and that changes from person to person and context to context. Primarily opinion-based. – Drew Oct 08 '16 at 22:29
  • "Too slow" as in "this will make the cursor change into an hourglass" or "most users will find it annoying". For context, I'm doing some work on `describe-variable`, and it's clearly not feasible to `pp` every value. – Tianxiang Xiong Oct 08 '16 at 22:39
  • Still too vague and user-dependent, not to mention platform-dependent. – Drew Oct 08 '16 at 22:46
  • FWIW, I use `pp` (well, [`pp+.el`](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PpPlus), but that doesn't change much here), and I don't hesitate to use it on structures that (at least I feel) are large. And my `describe-variable` does pretty-print. Is `load-history` or `font-lock-keywords` something that you find too big to pretty-print? – Drew Oct 08 '16 at 22:53

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