Re: Very interesting analysis of "the state of Emacs"

[Thomas Lord]

Miles Bader wrote:

Stephen Eilert <address@hidden> writes:
  

Before diving in the merits of whether or not it is possible to add
multi-tasking to Emacs (by that I assume full-blown threads), what are
the problems this is trying to solve?
    

One thing I've heard a lot is that it's annoying to wait 5 minutes for
gnus to finish reading in a huge group or something.

Of course Gnus could be rewritten to do potentially lengthy stuff in the
background (and that's what usually happens with such things ... e.g.,
"M-x man"), but it's probably not easy, and in many cases not even
desirable -- when the wait is short, I think it's less confusing for the
user for such actions to be synchronous.
  

There is that.

Another place where threads could help is with complex commands.

At present, concurrent complex command invocations must strictly "stack":
the order of invocation is always the reverse of the order of execution of
commands.   This can be especially annoying and confusing when you are
invoking complex commands in two completely unrelated windows or frames.

With threads, you could (conceivably) have multiple, independent recursive
edits.

-t

-Miles