Re: groff/-mandoc replacement

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 05:51:23PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> I also think it's ludicrous to consider trying to replace groff with
> something half-backed that only barely attempts to handle just one macro
> package's worth of documentation.

There is a very good reason to do that. mdocterm is over an order of
magnitude faster than groff. Given that it is hard to benchmark on my
laptop, some numbers from Hans on the VAX:
        time nroff -mandoc raidctl.8 > /dev/null
        17.56 real        17.09 user         0.47 sys

        time mdocterm -mandoc raidctl.8 > /dev/null
        0.37 real         0.29 user         0.07 sys

The various ditroff versions are somewhere around three times faster
than groff, which still makes an extreme difference.

Joerg