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I don't recall which version of Emacs first had "go to definition", but it was well before the 90's.

How easy was it in 90’s to have a go to definition over, say, 10% of today’s maven central?

indexing speed probably wouldn't be a problem. the index size would probably exceed available disk space for a typical workstation of the time.

ctags came about in 1992. etags was a little bit later.

was there something before etags in emacs?

The wiki page says ctags was part of the 3BSD release, which would put it about 1979. My memory isn’t good enough to recall which release of emacs picked up support.

I think there was a find-function key binding for lisp code before ctags, but these are very rusty bits I’m recalling.

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