Re: Make emacs-eww render asynchronously

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> In case anyone is reading this and thinking "get off your heirloom VAX
> grandpa, here is a nickel, buy a better computer," there is no reason
> for computers with gigahertz-plus CPUs and a gigabyte of memory to end
> up in the landfill, even if they are 10+ years old.  And work on
> performance issues caused by sloppy code and bad algorithms/data
> structures will benefit all GNU Emacs users.

My main laptop is a Thinkpad T61, my office desktop is a 2006 mac-mini,
so yes, I fully agree.

>> The emacs-w3m fetches the page asynchronously, but the rendering process
>> will freeze Emacs for a long time.
> Yes, this is an actual problem.  Óscar Fuentes probably does not
> notice it because he must have a fast computer - if you are hacking
> elisp code it is a good idea to do it on old slow hardware.

One of the reasons why we can still use 10+ year old computers is
because even the fanciest newest CPUs aren't *that* much faster (on
single-threaded code, as is the case here) thanks to the end of Dennard
scaling, so if it's "less than a second" on Óscar's computer there's
a good chance that it should be much less than "a long time" on the
OP's machine.

IOW there's probably some other difference than the hardware at play here.


        Stefan