[PATCH 11/11] completion: fill COMPREPLY directly when completing paths

During git-aware path completion, when a lot of path components have to be listed, a significant amount of time is spent in __gitcomp_file(), or more accurately in the shell loop of __gitcompappend(), iterating over all the path components filtering path components matching the current word to be completed, adding prefix path components, and placing the resulting matching paths into the COMPREPLY array.

Now, a previous patch in this series made 'git ls-files' and 'git diff-index' list only paths matching the current word to be completed, so an additional filtering in __gitcomp_file() is not necessary anymore. Adding the prefix path components could be done much more efficiently in __git_index_files()'s 'awk' script while stripping trailing path components and removing duplicates and quoting. And then the resulting paths won't require any more filtering or processing before being handed over to Bash, so we could fill the COMPREPLY array directly.

Unfortunately, we can't simply use the __gitcomp_direct() helper function to do that, because __gitcomp_file() does one additional thing: it tells Bash that we are doing filename completion, so the shell will kindly do four important things for us:

  1. Append a trailing space to all filenames.
  2. Append a trailing '/' to all directory names.
  3. Escape any meta, globbing, separator, etc. characters.
  4. List only the current path component when listing possible
     completions (i.e. 'dir/subdir/f<TAB>' will list 'file1', 'file2',
     etc. instead of the whole 'dir/subdir/file1',
     'dir/subdir/file2').

While we could let __git_index_files()'s 'awk' script take care of the first two points, the third one gets tricky, and we absolutely need the shell's support for the fourth.

Add the helper function __gitcomp_file_direct(), which, just like __gitcomp_direct(), fills the COMPREPLY array with prefiltered and preprocessed paths without any additional processing, without a shell loop, with just one single compound assignment, and, similar to __gitcomp_file(), tells Bash and ZSH that we are doing filename completion. Extend __git_index_files()'s 'awk' script a bit to prepend any prefix path components to all listed paths. Finally, modify __git_complete_index_file() to feed __git_index_files()'s output to ___gitcomp_file_direct() instead of __gitcomp_file().

After this patch there is no shell loop left in the path completion code path.

This speeds up path completion when there are a lot of paths matching the current word to be completed. In a pathological repository with 100k files in a single directory, listing all those files:

  Before this patch, best of five, using GNU awk on Linux:

    $ time cur=dir/ __git_complete_index_file

    real    0m0.983s
    user    0m1.004s
    sys     0m0.033s

  After:

    real    0m0.313s
    user    0m0.341s
    sys     0m0.029s

  Difference: -68.2%
  Speedup:      3.1x

  To see the benefits of the whole patch series, the same command with
  v2.17.0:

    real    0m2.736s
    user    0m2.472s
    sys     0m0.610s

  Difference: -88.6%
  Speedup:      8.7x

Note that this patch changes the output of the __git_index_files() helper function by unconditionally prepending the prefix path components to every listed path. This would break users' completion scriptlets that directly run:

  __gitcomp_file "$(__git_index_files ...)" "$pfx" "$cur_"

because that would add the prefix path components once more. However, __git_index_files() is kind of a "helper function of a helper function", and users' completion scriptlets should have been using __git_complete_index_file() for git-aware path completion in the first place, so this is likely doesn't worth worrying about.

Signed-off-by: SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com>
---
 contrib/completion/git-completion.bash | 34 +++++++++++++++++++++++---
 contrib/completion/git-completion.zsh  |  9 +++++++
 2 files changed, 39 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)