bdiff: don't check border condition in loop `plast = a + len - 1`. So, this "for" loop iterates from "a" to "plast", inclusive. So, `p == plast` can only be true on the final iteration of the loop. So checking for it on every loop iteration is wasteful. This patch simply decreases the upper bound of the loop by 1 and adds an explicit check after iteration for the `p == plast` case. We can't simply add 1 to the initial value for "i" because that doesn't do the correct thing on empty input strings. `perfbdiff -m 3041e4d59df2` on the Firefox repo becomes significantly faster: ! wall 0.072763 comb 0.070000 user 0.070000 sys 0.000000 (best of 100) ! wall 0.053221 comb 0.060000 user 0.060000 sys 0.000000 (best of 100) For the curious, this code has its origins in 8b067bde6679, which is the changeset that introduced bdiff.c in 2005. Also, GNU diffutils is able to perform a similar line-based diff in under 20ms. So there's likely more perf wins to be found in this code. One of them is the hashing algorithm. But it looks like mpm spent some time testing hash collisions in d0c48891dd4a. I'd like to do the same before switching away from lyhash, just to be on the safe side.

perf: add perfbdiff bdiff shows up a lot in profiling. I think it would be useful to have a perf command that runs bdiff over and over so we can find hot spots.

help: show help for disabled extensions (issue5228) This patch does not exactly solve issue5228 but it results in a better condition on this issue. For disabled extensions, we used to parse the module and get the first occurrences of docstring and then return the first line of that as an introductory heading of extension. This is what we get today. This patch returns the whole docstring of the module as a help for extension, which is more informative. There are some modules which don't have much docstring at top level except the heading so those are unaffected by this change. To follow the existing trend of showing commands either we have to load the extension or have a very ugly parsing method which don't even assure correctness.