Re: [tvraman@almaden.ibm.com: Re: Native play function slows down emacs on RH 7.3]

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    > Is anyone interested in implementing asynchronous playing of sound in
    > Emacs?  Forking sounds like a rather heavyweight method; perhaps the
    > sound output facilities have asynchronous output features.  Gerd,
    > do you know what is available?

    I'm afraid I don't know.  I'm relatively sure that I didn't see
    asynchronous playing of sound mentioned in the docs I found when I
    wrote the code some years ago, but docs were pretty scarce and bad at
    that time, so I wouldn't take it for granted that there in no such 
    facility.

Another possible technique would be to use multi-threading on
systems which support that.  Does anyone know how widespread
such support is now?

Another idea is that Emacs could launch a dedicated subprocess for
playing sounds, and then send a command to it for each sound.  The
subprocess would then do the system calls that actually play the
sounds.  This would be much more efficient than forking for each sound
to be played.