Re: Asynchronous DNS

[Elias Mårtenson]

On 23 January 2016 at 21:50, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> wrote:

 

I see four ways of implementing an async name resolution function:

1) Add a new `resolve-name' function that would fork Emacs, call
getaddrinfo/gethostbyname, and do a callback once we get a reply.  The
problem is that a forked Emacs is a very strange thing, and is not
something we otherwise do.  I looked at this for a day last time, and I
couldn't get it to work, really.  Perhaps somebody else could, though.

2) Use one of the newer async C resolver libraries.  This would not be
available on all platforms, and would be Yet Another Dependency which
I'm sure everybody would rather that we avoid.

3) Create a tiny helper program in lib-src that would read names from
stdin and output resolves on stdout.  It would use
getaddrinfo/gethostbyname, and could very well be multithreaded, so that
it could do name resolution on parallel.

4) Pick the data out of res_init to find the DNS servers, and then just
use dns.el for name resolution.  This would be trivial to implement, but
may not respect the name resolutions settings on some operating systems.

This is something I have been wondering for a while, and I think that this may be

as good a time as any to ask the question.

Are there any technical reasons why the name resolution (or whatever it is that

needs to be asynchronous) could not be run in a thread in the Emacs process

itself? As long as the thread is not running any Lisp code, it should work, correct?

I'm asking this because I've had some ideas on modules that I would write once

the loadable module support in Emacs is complete, and in some cases I want

to be able to do stuff in threads.

Regards,

Elias