From: Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Cc: rudalics@gmx.at, cyd@gnu.org, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,
emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Windows' "split status"
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:14:49 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87r50wwg92.fsf@spindle.srvr.nix> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <83fwhc8kxy.fsf@gnu.org> (Eli Zaretskii's message of "Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:07:21 +0200")
On 25 Nov 2011, Eli Zaretskii verbalised:
>> From: Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>
>> Emacs: resistance is futile; you will be assimilated and byte-compiled.
>> Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:00:30 +0000
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, cyd@gnu.org, monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,
>> emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>
>> I thought this was documentation for Lisp developers, not for Emacs
>> maintainers.
>
> It's both, actually. There's no other place to look for documentation
> of Emacs internals except the ELisp manuals, because the comments
> never tell enough. When you want to change some complex piece of
> code, and look for a comprehensive documentation of its contract, the
> ELisp manual is the only place you can find something close.
Yes indeed. I'm not saying it's not *useful* for Emacs maintainers!
> But I don't think this invalidates your point.
Quite. Lots of docstrings talk about invariants, because this is really
useful. Even something like the description of what `right-char' or
`newline' do are invariants. None of them should eschew talking about
those invariants simply because they are not atomic from the POV of the
Emacs core. Heck, `newline' is written in Lisp: from the POV of the
Emacs core, `newline' inserts soft newlines and then later marks them
hard, but nonetheless we talk about `newline' always inserting hard
newlines.
Where this suddenly does become urgent is if we ever find a way to
multithread Emacs -- but I strongly suspect that an Emacs with locking
fine-grained enough to maintain useful invariants would be
unmaintainable, as would an Emacs in which none of those invariants were
maintained cross-thread. What we'll need for multithreading is some sort
of transactional-memory scheme where Lisp in separate threads sees no
change to the state of Emacs from other threads until it (exits|returns
to the command loop|executes some special thread-yield function), and
even then the only changes it should see are those that have been done
in other threads that have reached the same point.
--
NULL && (void)
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-11-25 12:14 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 37+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-11-11 15:37 Windows' "split status" Chong Yidong
2011-11-11 18:37 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-12 0:36 ` Chong Yidong
2011-11-12 10:01 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-13 3:23 ` Chong Yidong
2011-11-13 10:49 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-13 16:10 ` Chong Yidong
2011-11-13 17:17 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-15 5:20 ` Chong Yidong
2011-11-15 7:25 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-15 9:39 ` Chong Yidong
2011-11-15 13:30 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-11-15 15:15 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-15 16:24 ` monnier
2012-01-10 16:26 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-23 12:36 ` Nix
2011-11-23 14:15 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-23 17:38 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-11-23 19:21 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-23 20:14 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-11-24 10:00 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-24 11:27 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-11-25 10:24 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-25 11:37 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-11-25 13:55 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-25 12:00 ` Nix
2011-11-25 12:07 ` Eli Zaretskii
2011-11-25 12:14 ` Nix [this message]
2011-11-25 13:55 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-25 13:54 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-15 15:15 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-15 18:37 ` Juri Linkov
2011-11-16 5:08 ` Chong Yidong
2011-11-16 10:11 ` martin rudalics
2011-11-16 13:34 ` Stefan Monnier
2011-11-16 17:01 ` Juri Linkov
2011-11-17 10:34 ` martin rudalics
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