Threads in emacs implementation

[Denis Bueno <dbueno@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

Compared to many of the people who contribute to this list, I'm an
unsophisticated emacser. I know that an enormous amount of intelligent
development has been put into GNU/Emacs over the years, and I don't
want to slight that.

Having said that, my question is, has thought been put into
multithreading parts of Emacs? Or exposing a rudimentary threading API
to Emacs Lisp? This could easily devolve into a war about threading
apis, but, just support some simple subset of pthreads would work.

The background for my question: In Gnus, certain network operations
often take a long time -- sometimes I don't want to check my email
when it prompts me for a password, but I hit Return anyway, causing
Emacs to visibly hang for a minute or two. Sometimes whatever server
Gnus wants is down (or DNS is down, or whatever), and it 'hangs' until
it's timed out. This downtime is in many cases at least long enough
that I could profitably be doing work in other Emacs buffers.

This downtime is probably experienced in other network modes in Emacs
(like Tramp, I suspect, although I don't personally use it).

So, why is Emacs single-threaded? What issues have been considered wrt
having a multithread api in Emacs lisp?

Thanks for Emacs as it is! I can't program without it.

-Denis