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

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Thu, 04 Dec 2003, address@hidden wrote:

> Dynamic binding causes no trouble for multiple threads if each
> thread has its own binding stack and switching threads swaps the
> bindings.
> 
> However, code like
> 
>   (setq global-list (cons foo global-list))
> 
> is a completely separate issue.  The problem here is that thread
> switching needs to be prevented between the access to global-list
> and the modification of global-list.  Of course, the potential for
> collision exists because global-list may be referred to elsewhere.
> But it does not depend on dynamic bindings.  If nobody ever binds
> global-list, if its global binding is the only one, the problem
> still occurs.

Why not just lock all other threads that use that global symbol (it is
bound in that thread)?  I apologize if I'm missing the point here.

Ted