Re: Patch for fields of `struct buffer'

[Richard Stallman]

     > > I don't think preemptive thread switching is a sensible goal.  It is
     > > so much trouble that it isn't worth doing even in the long term.
     > 
     > I don't think we will get to choose.

    FWIW, Guido Van Rossum is about +0.5 in Richard's camp.

I am not saying anything against parallel programming as a general
issue.  But the code needs to be written for that.  The code in Emacs
wasn't.  I devised the mechanism of the QUIT macro as a simple way to
avoid the need to confront lots of issues of the sort, "What happens
if Lisp code gets to run at some point in the middle of this?"  I made
only Eval call GC as a simple way to avoid lots of issues of the sort,
"What happens if it GCs right HERE?"

To make Emacs safe for parallelism, those issues would need to be
confronted.

I won't say it is impossible.  I do say it is a very large job,
which dwarfs that of handling variable bindings.  It is also the sort
of job which is error prone.


-- 
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org