Re: Patch for fields of `struct buffer'

[Richard Stallman]

    If you link against GNU Pth, the threading primitives become practically
    free aside from the few hundred pointers referring to global Lisp
    variables. I doubt the aggregate impact of following those indirections
    would have much of an impact over all the pointer-chasing Lisp code
    already performs. (How many cons cell are used for the output of
    parse-partial-sexp?)

Emacs is sometimes rather slow already on this machine.

    One approach successfully applied to other systems that make assumptions
    about a lack of preemptive concurrency is to put large locks around the
    sensitive portions and gradually split these locks up over time as the
    code is improved. Subrs not specially marked as concurrency-safe could
    be made to automatically take such a lock on entry,

I don't know how well that would work out in practice in Emacs,
but someone could give it a try.

-- 
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org