Re: Simulating a multithreaded Emacs with creative lisp..

[Ken Raeburn]

>     One of the major problems with Emacs is that it is not
>     multithreaded.  If you call a synchronous function your entire
>     Emacs is locked up until it finishes.
> That is true.  It would be very useful to make Emacs multithreaded,
> but it's a big job.  So we are waiting for someone to do it.

Guile supports multiple threads, at least on some platforms.  It's why
I started on that bit of Emacs hacking in the first place -- the
possibility that someday I might be able to edit files while Gnus is
fetching and sorting my mail, without rewriting Gnus from scratch and
without running multiple Emacsen.  It does have interesting
implications for dynamic variable bindings, and lots of other fun
issues, but I won't get into that right now.

Unfortunately, I haven't had enough time for this work in quite a
while.

With the Emacs repository open, perhaps I could set up a branch there
now, for other people to work on?  It would take me a little time to
re-synchronize so that CVS merging can work smoothly, but I'd like to
get it out there.  It'll be a long-term project, I think, so we'll
need some strategy for keeping it synchronized now and then with the
main trunk, but I can send some notes on what I've been doing so far.