[luatex] [ann] Improved pattern loading for Plain and LaTeX

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Dear all,

Users of LuaTeX Plain- or LaTeX-based formats in TeX Live 2009 probably noticed
(and were annoyed by) the very long loading time of these formats. This was due
to hyphenation patterns for all languages being dumped in the format, then
re-hashed by LuaTeX at format loading time, since LuaTeX doesn't do that at
iniTeX time any more.

Recently, LuaTeX-specific versions of babel's and etex's pattern loading systems
have been made (by Khaled, Élie and myself, with kind support by Mojca and
others) to avoid this problem by only allocating the languages statically, but
loading the actual patterns dynamically at runtime, so that only the patterns
for the languages actually used are loaded. This results in a considerably
shorter start-up time.

This system is installed in TeX Live pretest builds since today. I tested it as
well as I could, but experience proves things always go wrong in weird and
unpredicted ways, so more testing in various situations is most welcome, as well
as suggestions and bug reports.

If you are curious, you may read more about this in luatex-hyphen.pdf, tlmgr(1)
(action "generate") and the file language.dat.lua itself.

Many thanks to all the courageous testers,
Manuel.


PS: of course a completely dynamic system for languages is desirable, but our
goal here was to make minimal changes to the existing systems to fix the problem
with format loading time. Hopefully, (parts of) this work will be useful for
implementing a fully dynamic system later.