Re: Threads in emacs implementation

[Nic Ferrier <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk>]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

> And that's what multithreading is about: making conceptually easy
> tasks easy to code.  Not merely making them possible to code: you can
> always hardcode the inner state maintained by the combination of a
> stack and the program counter.
>
> But it is hard, error-prone work.

I wouldn't say writing async network protocol implementations is as
hard as you suggest. It's hard, but not that hard.

But it would be too hard to try and write async fontification code and
that's where threads would really help.

Given that, a simple, *very* partitioned thread model would not be
much use. It would make network programming *slightly* simpler, but
would not allow us to make font-lock quicker, or xml parse in the
background.


Nic