Re: advice needed for multi-threading patch

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

On Sep 24, 2009, at 16:04, Tom Tromey wrote:
>>>>>> "Giuseppe" == Giuseppe Scrivano <gscrivano@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> That's wonderful.  Does that mean that Gnus really runs in its own
>>> thread while you can do normal editing in other buffers?
>
> Giuseppe> Yes, it does (except some errors).  I am concentrating all  
> my
> Giuseppe> efforts on gnus, I think that if threads work well for gnus
> Giuseppe> they will work quite well with any other package.
>
> This is awesome.

Yes!

It was this very problem that initially got me thinking about threads  
(and from that, it was just a hop, skip and a jump to Guile) years ago.

> Giuseppe> At the moment it takes a lot to load folder, because there  
> are
> Giuseppe> not enough yield on the other thread and probably gnus  
> switch
> Giuseppe> buffers too often (causing a yield).
>
> I think we need to yield when a thread is waiting for I/O.

Yes, I think that needs to happen pretty much automatically.  Perhaps  
it would be sufficient to make the Lisp functions that can cause  
process filters to be run also yield to other threads.

>  And, we
> probably need a way to associate a process filter with a thread, so  
> that
> whatever input Gnus gets is processed in the right thread.

Yes, and this is an area where Gnus could be changed to take advantage  
of it once the facility is a bit more stabilized.  The output from one  
NNTP server can be processed into a list of newsgroups in one thread,  
while another thread converts IMAP output into a list of mailboxes, a  
third thread talks to yet another IMAP server, etc.

It might be interesting to look at Apple's Grand Central model, and  
see if something like that is practical to use in elisp with dynamic  
bindings...

Ken