view mercurial/help/diffs.txt @ 21809:e250b8300e6e

parsers: inline fields of dirstate values in C version

Previously, while unpacking the dirstate we'd create 3-4 new CPython objects
for most dirstate values:

- the state is a single character string, which is pooled by CPython
- the mode is a new object if it isn't 0 due to being in the lookup set
- the size is a new object if it is greater than 255
- the mtime is a new object if it isn't -1 due to being in the lookup set
- the tuple to contain them all

In some cases such as regular hg status, we actually look at all the objects.
In other cases like hg add, hg status for a subdirectory, or hg status with the
third-party hgwatchman enabled, we look at almost none of the objects.

This patch eliminates most object creation in these cases by defining a custom
C struct that is exposed to Python with an interface similar to a tuple. Only
when tuple elements are actually requested are the respective objects created.

The gains, where they're expected, are significant. The following tests are run
against a working copy with over 270,000 files.

parse_dirstate becomes significantly faster:

$ hg perfdirstate
before: wall 0.186437 comb 0.180000 user 0.160000 sys 0.020000 (best of 35)
after:  wall 0.093158 comb 0.100000 user 0.090000 sys 0.010000 (best of 95)

and as a result, several commands benefit:

$ time hg status  # with hgwatchman enabled
before: 0.42s user 0.14s system 99% cpu 0.563 total
after:  0.34s user 0.12s system 99% cpu 0.471 total

$ time hg add new-file
before: 0.85s user 0.18s system 99% cpu 1.033 total
after:  0.76s user 0.17s system 99% cpu 0.931 total

There is a slight regression in regular status performance, but this is fixed
in an upcoming patch.

Mercurial's default format for showing changes between two versions of
a file is compatible with the unified format of GNU diff, which can be
used by GNU patch and many other standard tools.

While this standard format is often enough, it does not encode the
following information:

- executable status and other permission bits
- copy or rename information
- changes in binary files
- creation or deletion of empty files

Mercurial also supports the extended diff format from the git VCS
which addresses these limitations. The git diff format is not produced
by default because a few widespread tools still do not understand this
format.

This means that when generating diffs from a Mercurial repository
(e.g. with :hg:`export`), you should be careful about things like file
copies and renames or other things mentioned above, because when
applying a standard diff to a different repository, this extra
information is lost. Mercurial's internal operations (like push and
pull) are not affected by this, because they use an internal binary
format for communicating changes.

To make Mercurial produce the git extended diff format, use the --git
option available for many commands, or set 'git = True' in the [diff]
section of your configuration file. You do not need to set this option
when importing diffs in this format or using them in the mq extension.