Concurrency in Emacs

Concurrency in Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

Some of you may remember that when talking about what kind of
concurrency should be added to Emacs (locks, transactions, younameit),
I was of the opinion that we should stick to cooperative for now and we
may never want to move away from it because there might be a way to make
it parallel.  You may also remember that I was referring to a work that
I couldn't find any more.
Well, I think I found something related: http://ocm.dreamhosters.com/

I'm not sure whether such an approach is workable for Elisp (the
optimistic STM approach is not workable because of the difficulty of
unrolling side-effects, and it might be difficult to avoid deadlocks in
the lock-based approach), but I think it's an interesting direction if
we want to preserve enough backward compatibility.


        Stefan

Re: Concurrency in Emacs

[Aurélien Aptel]

I don't know if it was mentioned in previous posts but the support for
threads in the C implementation of Emacs can be a lot easier with
coccinelle[1].
Coccinelle is a tool that generates diff files for an entire source
tree based a semantic rules. Think of it as a _really smart_ sed with
operators and constructs for C. It's already used in the linux kernel
so it's production ready.


1: http://coccinelle.lip6.fr
Tutorial: http://home.regit.org/technical-articles/coccinelle-for-the-newbie/

Re: Concurrency in Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> I don't know if it was mentioned in previous posts but the support for
> threads in the C implementation of Emacs can be a lot easier with
> coccinelle[1].
> Coccinelle is a tool that generates diff files for an entire source
> tree based a semantic rules. Think of it as a _really smart_ sed with
> operators and constructs for C. It's already used in the linux kernel
> so it's production ready.

Nice tool indeed, thanks.


        Stefan

Re: Concurrency in Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

> I don't know if it was mentioned in previous posts but the support for
> threads in the C implementation of Emacs can be a lot easier with
> coccinelle[1].
> Coccinelle is a tool that generates diff files for an entire source
> tree based a semantic rules. Think of it as a _really smart_ sed with
> operators and constructs for C. It's already used in the linux kernel
> so it's production ready.

BTW, it might also be neat to try and get rid of the GCPRO stuff by
replacing it with a coccinelle "semantic patch".


        Stefan