kentcowgill.org/blog

Hooray!

Shortly after complaining about how long my main page was taking to load, I started thinking up ways to make it go faster. As far as I could see, one option would be to try to parse the perl with perl - but just borrow all the ideas and regexes from the perl.vim vim syntax file. Easy enough - just figure out what the metacharacters in vim map to in perl, etc etc and so forth.

About a third of the way through my translation, I realized it was going to be harder than I was expecting/hoping, because there are some conventions in vim's syntax files that makes that sort of thing somewhat easy.

Plus, I wasn't even sure how good the translations were, or whether or not they'd even do anything useful:

Yuck.

I toyed with the idea of doing something with PPI, but quickly dismissed that.

I then thought I might've remembered reading something about creating some kind of "vim server" with Text::VimColor - so a quick read of that yielded nothing. But I noticed the link in SEE ALSO to Apache::VimColor, which thank goodness mentions Cache::Cache (and sibling Cache::FileCache).

What was I thinking?

So the solution was exceedingly simple:

And just like that, the page is back to being under 2 tenths of a second to create. Even with (as of this post) more than 10 hunks of syntax colored code.

Yay!