Re: A simple(perhaps dumb) idea for a more responsive emacs

[Barry Fishman]

On 2023-10-06 07:54:49 +03, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Barry Fishman <barry@ecubist.org>
>> Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2023 17:34:01 -0400
>>
>> I was just suggesting that rather that waiting for some global solution
>> to be found, a less complex approach be considered in the mean time.
>> Where "pain points" could be considered a case by case basis, but still
>> provide a common mechanism to use.
>
> See, I'm not sure even this suggestion (that is already rather radical
> in its implications) will do.  Because, apart of buffers, we have the
> rest of the huge global state in Emacs, and Lisp programs are quite
> cavalier in relying on that, and there's a rare Lisp program in Emacs
> that doesn't access that global state in some way.  Something needs to
> be done about that as well.

[My ideas seem to fit well into the subject's simple (perhaps dumb)
category.  I hope I haven't outwore your patience.]

It would seem that "global state" is the thing that needs to be
dealt with first, when it comes to any thread based approaches in Emacs.

I was trying to start top down, identifying the "pain points",
and syntactically breaking them into a backgroundable, and
non-backgroundable parts.  It seems that approach can't work.

Alternative one can look at things bottom up, and propagate changes in
parts of the global state up the call stack.

In many languages that is done using an asynchronous function and
signaling protocol.

Implementing something like this in Emacs, and in a staged manner that
doesn't break existing code is something I would not propose without
doing a lot more thought and some actual example coding.

-- 
Barry Fishman