Re: Announce of Zsh Navigation Tools

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca>]

On 09/12/2015 03:10 PM, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Sep 12,  2:03pm, Ray Andrews wrote:
> }
> } What are the pros and cons of doing things that way vs. what might
> } seem to be the more obvious function definition? It's more compact,
> } but then requires the special calling via autoload. I expect there
> } will be some substantial difference.
>
> There isn't (intended to be) any execution-time difference.  If you
> can find one, it's probably a bug, except for the variations that
> are implied by (misapplication of) the -z / -k options of autoload.
>
> The main benefit is that you don't have loaded into memory those
> functions that you don't use. The not-yet-loaded form of an autoloaded
> function is very small.  You also avoid a lot of the startup time of
> parsing all those files.  E.g., the completion system is now nearly
> 10MB; why read all of that when most of it may never be used?
>
> I suppose, conversely, the drawback is that there may be a delay for
> parsing, the first time any such function is executed.
>
> Another drawback is that you can't easily switch among different
> emulation modes without taking special precautions, because the parse
> will always be applied using the mode at the time of first execution
> rather than the mode when the autoload command was issued.  We could
> probably stand an autoload option to apply "sticky emulation."
>
Ah ...

I load my own functions thusly:

     for aa in /aWorking/Zsh/Source/*;  do source $aa; done

... but as I understand you, autoload only 'really' loads things when 
they are actually called, so that has to be more efficient.  That 
immediately makes me want do something like this:

     for aa in /aWorking/Zsh/Source/*; do autoload $aa; done

... remembering of course that things need to be rewritten to look like 
scripts.  As to emulation, that's still way over my head.

BTW, looking at $fpath, it sure is laborious.  Do we, could wehave some 
sort of automatic subdirectory inclusion? Sorta: 
/usr/share/zsh/functions/**/  ... or something like that?