Re: What's the problem? (Was: Are there plans for a multi-threaded Emacs?)

[Stefan Monnier]

> There seems to be interest in a real multithreading solution, be it
> cooperative or preemptive, or an event-driven API.  I'm OK with any

The event-drive API is available right now (see process-filters and
run-with-idle-timer), but people don't like it too much.  Especially
writing background tasks using run-with-idle-timer is inconvenient.

The next step is to provide a simple multithreading model which will
simply allow the same as the current event-driven API but more conveniently
(i.e. something like cooperative multithreading, or even with a bit of
preemption, but probably all the switching done by hand in the elisp
interpreter: no concurrency inside the C code).

As for true parallelism, as I said the only use for it is speed, so I don't
see it as particularly important.  But maybe within 10-20 years things will
have changed a little.


        Stefan