Hello Eli,

I will fully read and process your thorough reply later tonight or
tomorrow, but in the meantime let me just restate, or clarify in case it
wasn't clear, that I expect the 30s, 15s and 0.1s case to break equally as
quickly, namely as quick as I can type the first input.

And indeed that's what happens on Linux and Mac OSX, but not on Windows.
If your reply already addresses this apparent discrepancy, then I apologize
for my premature clarification in advance.

Thanks,
João



On Mon, Oct 8, 2018, 16:06 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > From: João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com>
> > Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2018 11:48:01 +0100
> >
> > I would expect while-no-input to break out of accept-process-output very
> > quickly after user keyboard input.  These expectations are met except
> > for some situations.
>
> I think your expectations are incorrect.  My expectations are that if
> you call accept-process-output with a timeout of 30 sec, then
> while-no-input will return after 30 sec plus a small delay.  It's just
> that in order to see this in action, your experiment must be done in a
> "clean room", and that is not easy.
>
> First, one basic fact: accept-process-output calls
> wait_reading_process_output in a way that instructs it not to wait for
> keyboard input, you can see that clearly in the code (read_kbd is
> passed as zero).  This means that wait_reading_process_output will
> call pselect with the timeout of 30 sec (in your case), and will wait
> that long before it returns (unless there's a subprocess that gives us
> some stuff).  So why would you expect while-no-input that calls
> accept-process-output with that timeout to return earlier?
>
> Maybe you expect while-no-input to interrupt the pselect call when you
> press SPC?  But that's not how keyboard input works in Emacs.  In some
> configurations (e.g., GUI frame on X), keyboard input indeed delivers
> a signal to Emacs, but the signal handler just sets a flag and
> returns, it doesn't jump out of the pselect call.  It is then the job
> of the running Lisp code to check whether keyboard input is available,
> and act accordingly: set the quit-flag, and then test that flag soon
> enough to return from while-no-input.  But since the "running Lisp
> code" is in this case stuck in the pselect call, it cannot do anything
> before pselect returns, right?
>
> Now to the "clean room" part: the reason why you don't always see this
> 30-sec delay is because there are several factors that "contaminate"
> the picture:
>
>   . timers -- these cause us to reduce the timeout until the
>     expiration time of the next timer, so pselect returns earlier than
>     after 30 sec
>   . the first time wait_reading_process_output is called, it almost
>     immediately checks for available keyboard input, before it calls
>     pselect
>
> Therefore, to see the 30-sec delay, you need:
>
>   . stop all timers, which in "emacs -Q" means:
>     . disable blink-cursor-mode
>     . disable global-eldoc-mode
>     . disable font-lock-mode
>     . cancel the undo--auto-bindary-timer (I did that via list-timers)
>   . type "C-u C-x C-e", wait for a few seconds, and only then type SPC
>
> If I do all of the above, I see 30 sec plus a small delay every time I
> run your 2nd test.
>
> > I tried quickly pluggin GDB in at the right time, but I don't know if
> > I'm using the right GDB (using msys's which is pretty slow) and I
> > probably should be using an unoptimized Emacs.  Anyway, as a start this
> > is what "bt full" look like:
> >
> >    (gdb) bt full
> >    #0  0x00007ffc97b0d8c1 in ntdll!DbgBreakPoint () from
> /c/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/ntdll.dll
> >    No symbol table info available.
> >    #1  0x00007ffc97b39a0b in ntdll!DbgUiRemoteBreakin () from
> /c/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/ntdll.dll
> >    No symbol table info available.
> >    #2  0x00007ffc952b3034 in KERNEL32!BaseThreadInitThunk ()
> >       from /c/WINDOWS/System32/KERNEL32.DLL
> >    No symbol table info available.
> >    #3  0x00007ffc97ae1461 in ntdll!RtlUserThreadStart () from
> /c/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/ntdll.dll
> >    No symbol table info available.
> >    #4  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()
>
> On Windows, when you attach a debugger to a program, the OS creates a
> special thread in the debuggee, and that is the thread whose backtrace
> you see here.  That thread is never an interesting one, so the first
> thing you need to do after attaching is switch to the Lisp thread, by
> typing "thread 1" at the GDB prompt.  Then the backtrace will make
> much more sense.
>
> >    Backtrace stopped: previous frame inner to this frame (corrupt stack?)
> >    (gdb) xbacktrace
> >    Undefined command: "xbacktrace".  Try "help".
> >
> > xbacktrace probably failed because of some Python error loading .gdbinit
>
> No, it says "Undefined command", which means it doesn't know what
> xbacktrace is.  You probably didn't start GDB from the Emacs's src
> directory, so it didn't read the .gdbinit file which defines that
> command.  You can do that manually by typing the command
>
>   (gdb) source /path/to/emacs/src/.gdbinit
>
> (This last part is not specific to Widnows.)
>