Re: Flymake refactored

[Stefan Monnier]

> And I think the only real reason "old" Flymake managed to launch ~300
> processes immediately without choking up is that it did so under
> with-demoted-errors, so that's not really a fair comparison (though,
> granted, I removed it --- and now I understand why it was there).

Ah, in which case it's not that the old flymake.el worked, but that it
croaked more discretely?  That would be a good explanation.

> I don't see what flymake.el can do about it, since it is was designed
> to be agnostic to the way backends allocate resources to start
> syntax checks.

The problem can be fixed "anywhere" between desktop.el and make-process.

There's a good argument that desktop.el should load buffers more lazily.

There's also a good argument to be made that flymake.el should itself work
more lazily (don't start checking until the buffer is actually
displayed, for example).

I think asking backends to perform the throttling is a bad idea: we want
the backends to be as lean/simple/concise as possible.

Performing the throttling in make-process is also an option, but I think
it's probably too low a level to do it right, unless we add a :throttle
arg like you suggest (so that the higher-level code can pass the info),
but that pushes the responsibility to the backend again.


        Stefan