jeffrin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: J> It is said that emacs is single threaded.
Yup. J> * Why is it so ? J> * Is there any work in progress to make it multithreaded ? J> * Is there any disadvantage or disadvantages if it is J> multithreaded. Well, aside from the buzzword-coolness, there's nothing intrinsically better about multithreaded applications in most cases. Even if Emacs were multithreaded, you wouldn't notice unless you were doing a fairly restricted set of things, generally involving doing large amounts of processing within Emacs proper. (Gnus does tend to, though; the main side-effects would be Emacs redrawing while it's processing and being able to do other things while Gnus is slurping in mail.) That having been said, it's a major pain to write safe, reliable multithreaded code, especially for something as big as Emacs that has a lot of legacy code. Consider the problem of doing a background update for something like Gnus: you'd not only need a multithreaded backend in the Emacs C code, you'd also need multithreaded Lisp. Which means you'd need to rewrite *all* of the existing elisp code out there to be thread-aware, which is just painful. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell
