While working on https://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/11200
Riki has improved the lyx2lyx code in terms of performance. Today I compared the time necessary to convert the big and slow lyx file, used in the trac report, using both python 2 and python 3. The difference in this case is a ~ 41% improvement when using python 3.6 when compared with python 2.7. This is interesting and not unexpected (I am aware of the issues of the double negative in English). Since we use unicode strings (as for us the encoding matters) we are seeing the benefits of almost 10 years of development after the release of python 2.7. The initial releases of python 3 where slower than python 2.7 but release after release the performance has improved. Nice work to all the involved in this effort. Without further thought I would like to thank to Georg, Enrico, Riki, Jürgen and others that I am forgetting now. This is just a data point but impressive nevertheless. :-) There is room for improvement, if necessary some of the workhorses of conversions like parser_tools.py can be converted to C for performance. But before doing that we need to have numbers from profiling. :-) Regards, -- José Abílio
