Re: Patch for fields of `struct buffer'

[Helmut Eller]

* Tom Tromey [2011-02-11 21:59] writes:

> Helmut> Where "task.el" is a file containing the program that does all the
> Helmut> work. A worker starts with an (almost) empty environment and must
> Helmut> initialize all needed state from zero.
>
> This seems very impractical to me.

Why?

> Helmut> In particular if some library is
> Helmut> needed it must be loaded explicitly (that's not visible in the parent
> Helmut> thread).  A worker can only communicate with other threads via pipes 
> (I
> Helmut> think workers exchange Javascript objects in JSON format in HTML5; 
> maybe
> Helmut> we would use sexps for Emacs).
>
> A variant of this idea is either to add a `fork' primitive to Emacs (not
> portable, more's the pity) or just spawn a headless Emacs with
> bidirectional communication.  With the fork approach you could even do
> fancy things like let the child inherit and take over some network
> connections.

Inheritance is not strictly needed.  File descriptors could be passed
over Unix sockets.

> This approach is somewhat heavy, as you say.  Also, I think initializing
> the new environment (in the spawn model) is non-trivial.  All those
> globals do matter...

A copy-on-write scheme is difficult; starting from zero seems much simpler.

Helmut