Iris asked to look into incremental text rendering, hoping parley
supported it. It does not, by design: a `Layout` re-linebreaks and
re-aligns freely but "if the text content or the styles applied to that
content change then a new `Layout` must be created", its LRU cache holds
harfrust's per-font shaper data rather than shaped runs, and its own
`PlainEditor` rebuilds the whole layout from the whole buffer on every
keystroke.
The app already does what incremental layout would buy: `RowBlocks::
apply_delta` keeps one `TextEdit` per markdown block and re-shapes only
the one a delta landed in. Re-splitting the markdown to find it is 18µs
at 18,000 characters; comparing the blocks is 470ns.
What is left is one `TextBuffer::shape` of that block, linear in its
length at ~0.23ms per 1,000 characters here -- and the bench fixture's
streamed message is 14,888 characters in a *single* block, a run-on
paragraph with no blank line in it, so every delta reshapes all of it.
That is 3.5ms of the measured 3.86ms frame.
Real replies are not that: across 7,706 top-level blocks from 3,675 real
assistant messages on this machine (lengths only, no content copied
anywhere), p50 147 characters, p90 449, p99 836, largest 1,580, nothing
above 4,000; code fences p50 126, largest 589. At those sizes a reshape
is 48µs to 372µs here, roughly 0.12-0.93ms on the phone -- inside a
120Hz budget with no incremental anything.
So the recommendation is not to build it, and to give the fixture's
streamed message the paragraph structure a real reply has instead. Three
runs added to `frame_profile.rs` so none of this is re-derived: what
reshaping a growing message costs (including at the sizes real replies
reach), where a delta's cost is, and what the fixture actually streams.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
irisandClaude Opus 5
43a3a345e4