> For each of these categories, _setup line 12 rebuilds the value of
> the _comp_colors array to add new patterns such that any pattern that
> started with '=' gets copied with a prefix matching the tag currently
> being tested; e.g. '(commands)=...' or '(jobs)=...'
> 
> This is done even for tags that won't have any matches because the
> colors array has to be ready for the internals to use when a match is
> found, there's no way to "call back" to build it on demand.
> 
> The expensive bit is that _comp_colors is declared as a unique array,
> so every time it gets rebuilt the resulting 1700+ entries are all
> compared against one another to make sure there is no duplication.
> Repeat that nine times and it takes a while.

Are these steps all hard requirements? I don't have a good overview of
things, but some of these parts seem like they could be rethought to
work faster or the cpu/memory tradeoff shifted a bit towards more memory
use or something. Does the array really need to be unique? How much
fluctuation is in these contexts, this is a frequent operation so maybe
caching the entries, possibly only for known often called contexts,
could help?

 - V