Re: How close is elisp to CL now?

[William Gardella <gardellawg@gmail.com>]

Burton Samograd <burton@samograd.ca> writes:

> Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> how much closer does this get us to something like a 'concurrent
>> emacs', in which (e.g.) my emacs mailer can do background checks for
>> incoming mail while I am editing?  For the moment I've abandoned emacs
>> as a mail environment precisely because the lack of that feature so
>> often made my work grind to a halt.
>
> There is work being done on a threaded emacs, but there is still much
> work to be done.  A suggested fix for the mail problem you state is to
> start another instance of emacs and run your mail client there.
>
> One thing I've noticed is that network communication in emacs is
> normally handled with a libevent system (or something similar) so
> network communication acts like it's in a separate process.  I'm not
> sure if clients like gnus take advantage of this type of network
> communication yet though, but I think a blockless email client is
> possible with current emacs technology.
>
> --
> Burton Samograd

Medium/long-term, yes, one goal of introducing lexical scoping is to
make concurrency possible.  In the meantime, one possibility short of
concurrency--being pursued by org-mode for its new exporter library now
in tests for the 8.0 release, and also by Nic Ferrier's Elnode (
https://github.com/nicferrier/elnode ), and by John Wiegley's async.el--
is to use asynchronous Emacsen for big jobs and communications jobs.

Also, for Gnus specifically, emacs --batch jobs combined with using Gnus
in "Unplugged" mode is a good setup for background mail checking and
fast, non-blocking reading.  See (info "(gnus) Batching Agents"); I run
a script similar to the one there as an hourly cron job, then read
offline.

-- 
Regards,
WGG
I use grml (http://grml.org/)