Re: advice needed for multi-threading patch

[Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com>]

>>>>> "Stefan" == Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

Tom> ... which brings me to my problem.  I'd also like to apply a similar
Tom> treatment to buffer-local variables.  However, those do not have
Tom> convenient accessor macros, and before starting the laborious task of
Tom> wrapping all buffer field accesses, I thought I'd ask for advice.  Is
Tom> this a sane way to proceed?  Should I do something different?  Could I
Tom> get such a patch in before the rest of this work, just to make my local
Tom> divergence smaller?

Stefan> I'm not sure I understand what you want to do and which problem you want
Stefan> to solve.

I'm trying to properly implement per-thread let binding in the presence
of buffer-local variables.

I was planning to do this by inserting a thread-based lookup anywhere a
buffer-local was accessed.  However, to do this, I need to insert a
function call anywhere a field corresponding to a DEFVAR_PER_BUFFER is
used.

So, e.g., I would like to change:

    b->major_mode = Qfundamental_mode;

to:

    BUFFER_MAJOR_MODE (b) = Qfundamental_mode;

Doing this transform for all 54 DEFVAR_PER_BUFFER fields is a big pain,
though, so I thought I'd ask about it first.

Stefan> In my mind, in the first iteration of "adding multithreading
Stefan> to Emacs", no buffer could have two active threads at the same time
Stefan> (i.e. set-buffer would impose some kind of synchronization).  In such
Stefan> a context, I think that buffer-local variables (and fields in the buffer
Stefan> structures) don't need any special treatment, right?

I will try that.

Tom> I'll also note that the above approach does not work for DEFVAR_INT.
Tom> I have a plan for those but I fear it is somewhat expensive.  If you
Tom> have an idea...

Stefan> You can start with

Stefan>   #define Vfoo XINT(*find_variable_location (&impl_Vfoo))

Stefan> and then fix up all the cases where the variable in accessed as
Stefan> an lvalue.  In general, I'm not opposed to introducing macros
Stefan> for such accesses in the trunk, if it can make such work easier.

Yeah, this was my plan :-)

Tom