Re: Emacs on OS X development

[Jan Djärv]

Hello.

24 jul 2012 kl. 11:01 skrev Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>:

>> I have a plan to do more or less what Gdk does on OSX, use lower level (Core
>> Foundation) API:s. The NS-port has many special things (resizing, redrawing
>> and more) that depends on how things are done now, so it isn't
>> just a replacement of a few functions.
>> I haven't looked at the Mac port, but if it uses CF for the event loop, code
>> may be reused from there.
>> The basic concept is to have one thread for file descriptors and let the
>> main thread deal with Cocoa events.  The code today does something similar,
>> but it relies on polling each 0.1 second.
> 
> Could you add this discussion to etc/TODO, adding as much detail as you
> (and others) can about how it works now and how it could be changed?

I will do that within couple of days. 

> BTW, why not use the main thread for file-descriptors?

When Emacs isn't talking to subprocesses or the network there are no file 
descriptors. In that case we can manage with just the normal NS event loop and 
we do not need to communicate with another thread. I think this is a very 
common case (that is, it is how I use Emacs most of the time :-). 

Also, the NS event loop is already setup in the main thread, it requires some 
setup in other threads.

Communicate the data and result for a select call between threads is much 
easier than handling events between threads.

     Jan D.