Re: Patch for fields of `struct buffer'

[Richard Stallman]

    How does a thread get the buffer in the first place?  In an Erlang-style
    model a thread either has to create the buffer or receive it as a
    message from an other thread.

In Emacs, a program can find a buffer as the value of a global variable.
It can also call `get-buffer' with a string as argument to get its hands
on any buffer.  To remove these facilities would be such a big loss
that it is not worth considering.

It would be easy enough to stop one buffer from being current in more
than one thread.  Just make set-buffer do the interlocking.  That
would be an easy change, and it would block threads less often than
the above idea.

But even that could be too much blocking of threads.  If a thread
is sitting idle with a certain buffer current, that would block
all other threads from operating on it.  That would be a big problem.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org