bug#81624: New command: xref-find-by-kind

On 19/08/2026 01:22, João Távora wrote:
> You get the idea... You can do this mostly in Elisp if you really want
> to, but I admit it's a bit awkward, because there's no named obarrays
> and no read syntax for them.  So the elegant last line would become an
> odd intern-soft with an extra arg.  Now that I think of it, not sure the
> Elisp version really avoids your "coin-flip" problem, because
> intern-soft does a runtime lookup anyway, whereas in CL that job is done
> at read-time and the right symbol reference is already compiled in.

It sounds like we could model this using an alist or a hash-table too, 
just with a different performance characteristics.

What makes an elegant solution difficult, even in theory, is that 
xref--read-kind a) loops through all values, b) does a lookup by :key.

But xref-find-by-kind's body does a lookup by :kind. And using two 
hash-tables for this would be ridiculous by any standards.

> Anyway, this is just academic, these lookups are super cheap, don't do
> it 🙂

Yep :)