Re: Emacs does not listen on w32

[Stefan Monnier]

> I made a mistake when essentially changed the fontify-region-function
> I used.  This lead to Emacs looping updating the echo area with new
> messages (trace messages), but not listening even to the OS events.
> I clicked the upper right X to try to close Emacs, but
> nothing happened.

> I even had to shut off the pc power since I could not get the Windows Task
> Manager to come up.

> It looks to me there must be two bugs here:

> - Emacs not giving up cpu to windows.

This would be a bug (or shortcoming) in the OS: the application never
has to "relinquish the CPU" because the OS preempts the
application instead.  But it's surprisingly difficult for an OS to make
sure that it's *always* responsive no matter what the applications do.

My guess is that Emacs started to eat up memory, causing the machine to
thrash, which is the typical situation where the OS becomes unresponsive.

> - Emacs is not listening to OS events when it executes lisp code.

Emacs does listen.  You've hit some bug somewhere.


        Stefan