Re: Are there plans for a multi-threaded Emacs?

[Richard Stallman]

    I think migrating Emacs towards a threading model is possible:

    - start with all primitive or ELisp functions assumed NOT thread-safe

    - allow threads to run, but any access to a function needs to be
      synchronous.  At first, this will effectively make threads simple
      switched tasks, and will probably make Emacs slower.

Many sections of Lisp code would need to have locking in order
to run correctly with multiple threads.  For instance, everything
of the form

  (setq global-list (cons foo global-list))

would need locking.