On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 05:17:09PM -0500, rgheck wrote: > I was puzzled by this, too, but reading Abdel's code, I think he was > thinking more in terms of threads than in terms of processes, and so not > seeing that each process has its own memory space.
Yes, probably. > That said, and on a slightly different topic, I think implementing a > fork for the LaTeX stuff wouldn't be hard if we could rely upon shared > memory to pass back the error list. Is this hard to do? or is it trivial > if the child process keeps a pointer to that structure? Presumably, this > structure needs to be dynamically allocated, and the pointer should be a > shared pointer, so the memory won't be released in case the parent > should happen to die before the child. (I see warnings about this too in > the ForkedProcess code.) And then when the child is done, it signals the > parent, and the parent can look at the error list, etc. If your concern is inter-process communication, I think that in a child-parent context this is best accomplished through unnamed pipes. I am sure that even MSVC has the pipe() call. > I mention all of this only because it is SUCH a common user request. To > be sure, there are other issues: It'll be very hard to match the errors > with locations in the LyX file if the LyX file has changed. But then, an > option would be to retain a copy of that buffer in memory, and then > display it, with the errors tagged to it, if indeed there are errors. > OK, so maybe that's not trivial. But it doesn't sound terribly > impossible. Or are there other issues I'm missing? I don't think that the LyX design allows that easily and, frankly, I don't think that it is a good idea. What has sense, IMHO, is allowing to work on a different file while another one is being processed by LaTeX. Then, I am not as good as a computer at multitasking, so I don't miss this feature either ;-) -- Enrico
