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

[Stephen Eilert]

Richard M Stallman wrote:
>     The other hard problem is multi-tasking in the Emacs Lisp engine.
>     RMS once left me with the impression that this was virtually
>     intractable, especially if one wanted to have existing Elisp code base
>     compatibility, a reasonable thing to want.
>
> I think "intractable" might be too pessimistic.  It is certainly
> a lot of work, but someone could give it a try.
>
>
>   
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?

Is it to add background processing (as in, file indexing, background 
compilation, downloads and the like)? If then, a notion of task 
priorities could be discussed. For instance, Eclipse knows that, in 
order to deploy an application, it must be compiled first. It 
understands that those tasks cannot happen in parallel and should be 
queued. On the other hand, you can start downloads (usually, plugins and 
updates for said plugins) right away.

It could be a way to use the increasing amount of available processing 
cores in personal computers. Then again, Emacs doesn't seem like a 
particularly CPU-bound application.

So I am at a loss why this is so important. Could someone clarify?


Stephen