Re: [PATCH 12/12] docs: kdoc: Improve the output text accumulation

[Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>]

Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org> writes:

> Em Thu, 10 Jul 2025 17:30:20 -0600
> Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> escreveu:
>
>> Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org> writes:
>> 
>> > With that, I would just drop this patch, as the performance is
>> > almost identical, and using "emit()" instead of "+=" IMO makes
>> > the code less clear.  
>> 
>> I've dropped the patch - for now - but I really disagree with the latter
>> part of that sentence.  It is far better, IMO, to encapsulate the
>> construction of our output rather than spreading vast numbers of direct
>> string concatenations throughout the code.  So this one will likely be
>> back in a different form :)
>
> The main concern was related to performance penalty - as based on
> the latest test results, Pyhon currently handles very poorly list
> concat (30% to 200% slower at the latest test results).

Yes, I understood that part

> Yet, at least for me with my C-trained brain parsing, I find "=+" a
> lot easier to understand than some_function().
>
> Btw, IMHO Python is not particularly great with names for concat/accumulate
> commands. For list, it is append(), for set it is add(). Yet, "+=" is almost
> universal (from standard types, only sets don't accept it, using, 
> instead, "|=", which kind of makes sense).
>
> Adding a function naming emit() - at least for me - requires an extra brain 
> processing time to remember that emit is actually a function that doesn't
> produce any emission: it just stores data for a future output - that may 
> even not happen if one calls the script with "--none".

OK, I'll ponder on a different name :)

Perhaps the new not_emit() could even be aware of --none and just drop
the data on the floor.

Thanks,

jon