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

[David Kastrup]

Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:

> On 08 Dec 2003, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> > If you want to afford a separate binding stack for every thread,
> > this also means that every _read_ _access_ to a symbol must run
> > via the thread's binding stack instead of just using the stack
> > whenever the a binding _changes_.
> 
> So you're saying that it will slow down Emacs by using memory and
> CPU, to manage the thread-local binding stack, correct?  I agree.

Do you have an idea what figure we are speaking about here?  I repeat:
_every_ access to a symbol that now works directly instead has to work
via stack pointers.  And CPUs like the x86 do not have spare address
registers flying around.

We are quite probably talking about a _significant_ slowdown of the
Lisp machine here.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum