Re: Lisp Questions - reading a file and processes stalling

[Stefan Monnier]

>> insert-file-contents is really the lightest weight of getting the
>> content of a file into a buffer.  Why do you doubt it?
[...]
> I can't seem to find a way of telling Emacs to put the contents of the
> file in a buffer then move along.

insert-file-contents *is* the "way of telling Emacs to put the contents
of the file in a buffer then move along".  Yes, it does a lot of work
because it needs to find the coding-system to use to read the file, and
other such things, but that's what Emacs provides.  If it's too slow,
you'll probably have to do some of the work in another process (e.g. as
is done by M-x grep).

> Yeah, I didn't think so but it was worth asking the gurus.  I'll
> probably just deal with it since I'm generally happier with just one
> instance of emacs.  For now, at least.

There's a few people who started working on adding concurrency to Emacs.
It's going to be a long road, but we hope to include a first
experimental version in Emacs-24.  IIUC their current code is able to
run Gnus in its own thread.


        Stefan