nomuch_addresses.py

[Daniel Schoepe]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:15:09 -0000, Justus Winter <4winter at informatik.uni-hamburg.de> wrote:
> Quoting Daniel Schoepe (2012-02-17 02:28:52) [emphasis mine]:
> >Just for completeness: I'm using the nice nottoomuch-addresses.pl script
> >[1] by Tomi Ollila *which doesn't require any bindings* and is incredibly
> >fast (after generating an initial address database).
> 
> I don't get it. The perl script isn't using any library bindings,
> mainly because there are no libnotmuch bindings for perl. *But* it
> does call the notmuch binary which is worse:

I think that emphasis you added may be a bit misleading:

I specifically mentioned that it doesn't need bindings, because the
initial problem in this thread had to do with missing bindings, not
because I think it's inherently a good thing.

The reason I mentioned nottoomuch-addresses at all, is that completion
itself is _a lot_ faster (at least for me), compared to
addrlookup. According to the wiki, notmuch-addresses.py is even slower
than addrlookup, so I thought (and still think) that it was worth
mentioning. Of course, one could rewrite the database-generation part in
python using the bindings, but I personally don't think it's that
necessary.

> * incredibly high overhead (fork&exec) compared to a simple function
>   call (plus maybe some kind of ffi)

I think nottoomuch-addresses.sh is a good example how such performance
considerations can be outweighed by choosing a good "algorithm" instead
(extracting all addresses beforehand).

> * manual and error prone serialization of ''function arguments''
> * manual and error prone deserialization of ''return values''
> * very limited error reporting and handling capabilities
> * any kind of resource (think handle to a xapian database) is lost if
>   the process exists resulting in further overhead if the binary is
>   called multiple times
> 
> I do get the feeling that it is perceived as desirable not to require
> any kind of notmuch bindings (David once said something similar about
> nmbug).

While I don't think that using bindings is a bad thing, the fact that we
can do non-trivial things like nmbug without them, seems to be a good
indicator for the quality of the command line interface though. (And
hence notmuch lends itself well to being used in shell scripts).

Cheers,
Daniel

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