> Actually, the tests on a large, real-world corpus of manual pages
> containing a large fraction of mdoc(7) that i did two and a half
> years ago seemed to indicate that the execution time benefit is
> roughly consistent with what one would expect if it were mainly due
> to the simple reduction of the macro file size:
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2015-03/msg00068.html
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2015-03/msg00070.html
>
> In that sense, macro file size does seem to be the main effect, and
> the savings in execution time seem to usually fall into the range of
> 5-20% in cases that occur in practice.
OK, but groff is not man pages only – essentially, man pages never use
extensive loops...
> a) You mean that savings of 5-20% in execution time are
> "significant", even though formatting with mandoc would save
> about 60-90% of formatting time instead?
Ralph has answered this :-)
> b) Or do you mean that for a contrived test file calling mdoc(7)
> macros many times in a .while loop, with little or no text in
> the input file except that tight loop, savings are likely much
> larger? AFAIK that was never tested, but how would it be
> relevant?
Again, groff is more than just using the man and mdoc packages. The
stripping off of comments is part of groff's build process since 30
years or so – I don't see an immediate reason to change that.
Bjarni's suggestions of better documentation is the way to go IMHO.
Werner
