Poor performance of long typing animation

[jcubic]

Issue summary

The longer the animation the slower it become

Expected behavior

The animation should be fast no matter how long, if using 0 as delay

Actual behavior

Animation slows down

Steps to reproduce

1. Open Gaiman Playground (the demo doesn't work right see Broken automated jargon demo gaiman#100)
2. Change echo result["def"] with echo* result["def"], 0

Additional notes

There is a need for some kind of optimization the longer function is split_equal that needs to be executed on each interval.

A possible solution is using an array as a prompt, and the CMD will assume that it's already partitioned and it may be faster to process since you will not need to use interate_formatting.

[jcubic]

split_equal actually is pretty fast, the real problem is that $.terminal.substring take longer and longer when the string becomes longer and you need to extract element far in the string.

[Pratyush-Nirwan]

can any one suggest me a work around for this?

[jcubic]

@Pratyush-Nirwan there are no solution to fix the issue yet, sorry. Unless you can use smaller strings.

[Pratyush-Nirwan]

ohh thats sad

[jcubic]

Just realized that maybe I can split a long string into chunks (lines) and process them one by one. It will speed up the animation.

[jcubic]

This is a difficult problem, the typing animation already uses partition to split the string into characters with optional formatting. But the draw prompt function (in cmd plugin) calls split_equal on each string (on each added character) and the longer the string the slowest the call. On my machine with ~3000 characters, it took about 50ms which is a lot of you have an animation with 0 delays.

I've optimized split_equal a bit, but this doesn't make much difference.

The only solution I see is to add some method to CMD plugin to allow to add of a single character to the prompt, this will make it possible to ignore the whole draw_prompt function.

[jcubic]

Now the lines are split and printed individually on the terminal. This improves the performance of long animations. But still, it slows down when using delay: 0 and long lines.

I leave this open maybe I will come up to speed this even further.