Re: What's the problem? (Was: Are there plans for a multi-threaded Emacs?)

[Ted Zlatanov]

On 08 Dec 2003, address@hidden wrote:

> The event-drive API is available right now (see process-filters and
> run-with-idle-timer), but people don't like it too much.  Especially
> writing background tasks using run-with-idle-timer is inconvenient.

> The next step is to provide a simple multithreading model which will
> simply allow the same as the current event-driven API but more
> conveniently (i.e. something like cooperative multithreading, or
> even with a bit of preemption, but probably all the switching done
> by hand in the elisp interpreter: no concurrency inside the C code).

I would be glad to help with any of this, to the best of my
abilities.  Do you think it's better as a patch, separate branch, or
built into the core?  What can I do to help?

> As for true parallelism, as I said the only use for it is speed, so
> I don't see it as particularly important.  But maybe within 10-20
> years things will have changed a little.

In 10-20 years we'll all be running Emacs neural implants :)

Thanks
Ted