Re: What's the problem?

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On 10 Dec 2003, miles@lsi.nec.co.jp wrote:

> IOW, it's annoying for the gnus programmer, but very easy for the
> emacs implementation.

Well, that's the rub, isn't it?  Simon and I, being Gnus programmers,
would like Emacs to provide something better than the current
framework so the pain will be spread out instead of concentrated on
us.  I think that improvements to Emacs would be beneficial to far
more people than improvements to Gnus, also.

> Some questions are (1) are there only a few points within gnus that
> represent most of the annoying delays

Hashtable lookups, list traversals, and arithmetic.  Those three show
up all over the place, and they are generally not mutually dependent
when done on separate articles.

> (2) do these places have fairly simple code structures that could be
> split up into pieces like the above example,

Generally yes, but sometimes they can get pretty complex (depending
on the number of references in an article or on the number of scoring
rules, for instance).

> (3) do these pieces not depend on the long-term consistency of
> any global state.

I think so.

> I don't know.  A framework like the above could pretty simply handle
> the I/O bound portion too, though.

Remember the auto-save (over NFS or Tramp) problem I mentioned.  I
don't think it can be done the way you propose, but I'll be happy to
be proven wrong.

Ted