Re: It's almost 2016 and when (single-threaded) Emacs hangs, you gotta be smashing your keyboard!

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 21:29:04 +0100
> From: Alexander Shukaev <haroogan@gmail.com>
> 
> This discussion might be with some rant flavor, and I apologize for
> that beforehand.  Currently, I have to work with directories mounted
> from network.  As a result, Dired either opens them slowly or hangs
> forever (looks like a bug and/or glitch).  I personally find this very
> frustrating, especially when I'm in the middle of work with 50+
> buffers open (some of which are still in modified state).  The only
> way to recover from such problems is to kill the Emacs process.

You are on Windows, right?

> how can so advanced text editor with ~30 year history be so unreliable
> and fragile to work with in randomly occurring cases?

FWIW, it isn't unreliable or fragile for me.  It is rather rock-solid,
my sessions are usually open for many weeks on end, and almost never
crash or hang.

> It may freeze or it may not freeze, but if it does, all of the
> unsaved work is lost, not to mention the fact that all of the layout
> of windows and open buffers are lost as well.

Neither of this is true.  When Emacs hits a fatal error, it
auto-saves, and if you activate the desktop-saving feature, it will
save a snapshot of your window and frame configuration fairly
frequently, so starting a new session recreates at least those buffers
which were visiting files or directories.

> First of all, I just want to once again draw your attention to one
> of the urgent issues (to this date) of Emacs.

Which urgent issue is that?

> And, secondly, I want to ask whether there exists a way to solve the
> problem described above without multi-threading?

On Posix systems, Emacs does use a kind of multi-threading: it invokes
the 'ls' command to generate the directory listing.  You can configure
Emacs on Windows to do the same, if you can get your hands on a decent
port of GNU 'ls'.