Tab completion of (say) `view` takes a long time

[pchiusano]

On bigger namespace trees in particular.

[ceedubs]

@stew's hunch, which seems plausible to me, is that it's related to the change to self-contained namespaces and the lib convention. Before you'd have a single name for everything in base. Now it might appear as .base.Optional, .myproject.lib.base.Optional, myproject.lib.json.lib.base.Optional, myproject.lib.distributed.lib.base.Optional, etc.

[aryairani]

@ChrisPenner I'm thinking we should go ahead and try restricting the tab completion to prefix-matching, but that it should support both absolute and relative prefixes. What would that take?

[ChrisPenner]

The relative prefix matching should be pretty easy, right now the absolute pattern matching is probably easy too.

If we want it to be future-proof for if we eventually stop keeping the whole root branch in memory I can rewrite it to use shallow branches for prefix searching, which should still be plenty fast, but doesn't require us to always have a global root branch.

It wouldn't take much extra work to do it that way, probably an extra hour or so, so that'd be my vote.

[pchiusano]

If we want it to be future-proof for if we eventually stop keeping the whole root branch in memory I can rewrite it to use shallow branches for prefix searching, which should still be plenty fast, but doesn't require us to always have a global root branch.

That sounds good to me too.