Re: Questions about throw-on-input

[Philipp Stephani <p.stephani2@gmail.com>]

Am Mi., 13. Mai 2020 um 16:44 Uhr schrieb Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
>
> > Cc: eliz@gnu.org, yyoncho@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > From: Alexander Miller <alexanderm@web.de>
> > Date: Wed, 13 May 2020 00:33:01 +0200
> >
> > In my ideal world all that stuff could be done non-blockingly in another
> > thread as much as possible, only needing to surface to the main UI
> > thread to make actual changes like inserting text/overlays/text
> > properties.
>
> Your ideal world seems to be based on an editor design that is very
> different from what Emacs is.  The absolute majority of objects which
> an average Lisp program manipulates are globally visible -- buffers,
> windows, frames, global variables, the obarray, etc., and doing that
> in non-blocking ways is not really trivial.
>

And that's what I'd call one of the biggest problems in current
Emacs's design. Much of the development in programming practices over
the last few decades has been moving away from global mutable state,
in order to increase robustness and predictability, and also to make
concurrency without subprocesses possible.