Re: Patch for fields of `struct buffer'

[Daniel Colascione]

On 1/31/11 11:37 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     Yes.  I think that is the right tradeoff given my long term goal, which
>     is preemptive multi-threading.
> 
> I don't think preemptive thread switching is a sensible goal.  It is
> so much trouble that it isn't worth doing even in the long term.
> Thus, it is a mistake to do much work now, or complicate the code now,
> or cause a slowdown now, for the sake of preemptive thread switching.

The world is increasingly moving toward parallel processing, and we
haven't seen single-core performance improve for years now. Meanwhile,
Emacs has become more computationally demanding, not only through new
features like CEDET, but via improvements to old ones as well. I find
myself regularly bumping up against CPU limits in my Emacs hacking.
Processor trends won't change any time soon, and forfeiting the power of
multi-core machines by proscribing OS-level, preemptive multitasking is
a mistake that will be hard to correct if assumptions about cooperative
threads are baked into the system early on.

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