Re: It's almost 2016 and when (single-threaded) Emacs hangs, you gotta be smashing your keyboard!

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Emacs can work fine with slow external processes; we interact with them 
> asynchronously. If Dired doesn't (I'm not sure)

It doesn't.  It calls call-process.  (And it's not Dired itself, it's
the insert-directory function that Emacs provides.)

> that could be fixed.

Indeed, I think doing that will go along way towards solving the
problems with listing slow directories, let alone getting hung while
at that.