Re: Could each Emacs frame utilize a thread?

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 9 Dec 2001, Kevin A. Burton wrote:

> Couldn't each new frame utilize a new thread/process?

Richard and others might have a broader perspective, but I believe
starting a new thread for each frame would require a massive rewrite
of many crucial parts of Emacs.  The current code base assumes
single-threaded operation in too many places, and there are lots of
global variables lying around which prohibit reentrancy.

> When I fetch gnus in one frame it shouldn't prohibit me from editing
> in another frame.

I believe Gnus has an option you can flip to make it do some of its
work asynchronously.  This works by running some of the code off an
idle timer, like stealth font-lock does.

Idle timers is the means to write pseudo-multithreaded code in Emacs.
If the existing facilities to do this are not convenient enough,
perhaps we should have some special form to make it more convenient.