Emacs 27.2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Emacs 27.2

#111

Post by taeric » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:12 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #109

taeric wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I get this in principal. I'm curious in practice. How many things aren't already waiting on another foreign process that take time? Edit: I could see some things like syntax highlighting being a benefit. Though, I somewhat expect those to already be moving to lsp tricks. Layout, in general, makes sense to be a bit more responsive. But I'm not clear how general threading helps with that. Edit2: are there good…

The big things are indeed being outsourced to separate processes. LSP handles a lot, I also see some attempts at moving syntax highlighting to tree-sitter[0]. But all such work means a good chunk of code is running inside a foreign process, whose behavior cannot be easily inspected or modified at runtime. But there are a lot of various smaller things in Emacs and elisp module ecosystem that would benefit from being a…

The inspection and modification is a strong point that I should have considered.

Re: Emacs 27.2

#112

Post by taeric » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #107

taeric wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I get this in principal. I'm curious in practice. How many things aren't already waiting on another foreign process that take time? Edit: I could see some things like syntax highlighting being a benefit. Though, I somewhat expect those to already be moving to lsp tricks. Layout, in general, makes sense to be a bit more responsive. But I'm not clear how general threading helps with that. Edit2: are there good…

I stopped using Gnus because its elisp freezes Emacs (I now use mu4e, which has a separate process). I would guess Eww would have a similar issue, although I've never been able to get it to work (I use emacs-w3m, which has a separate process). I've found some programming modes to be very slow and prone to freezing; most noticably Scala using Metals (which uses lsp).

Do you know what makes it freeze? My gut would be that they did not set a buffer with a sentinel, such that even with threading, they would have still don't a blocking call there.

That said, valid points. I am curious to benchmark parts of emacs now. (I turned off most programming features, since most of my code is remote and the network at home kills me.)

Re: Emacs 27.2

#113

Post by magwa101 » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:22 PM UTC

I started on an emacs inspired editor Epsilon in the late 80s. It allowed for multitasking and I could do compiles in one window whilst editing in the other. It was a total game changer for DOS development. I had forgotten about it, but they're still going strong! When I switched to Unix I switched to emacs. I'm on Visual Studio Code now and load up the "emacs" plugins. Over the years I've seen so many emacs features get reimplemented elsewhere, my favorite being file/variable/name/etc. auto expansion/suggestion.

Re: Emacs 27.2

#114

Post by hollerith » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #96

taeric wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually somewhat unclear in what the goals of threading are, at times. Pushing a process out and having a sentinel on a buffer has long been possible. What is the aim?

Make it more light-weight and do it without needing a foreign binary. If your elisp program needs to offload some computations to a background thread, you don't want to make a binary specifically for it - it would destroy the flexibility and portability of otherwise perfectly fine elisp code.

>you don't want to make a binary specifically for it

Most of the Emacs code I've seen that spawns a process spawns a short shell script: no custom binary needed.

Re: Emacs 27.2

#115

Post by chriswarbo » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

taeric wrote: post #112

chriswarbo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped using Gnus because its elisp freezes Emacs (I now use mu4e, which has a separate process). I would guess Eww would have a similar issue, although I've never been able to get it to work (I use emacs-w3m, which has a separate process). I've found some programming modes to be very slow and prone to freezing; most noticably Scala using Metals (which uses lsp).

Do you know what makes it freeze? My gut would be that they did not set a buffer with a sentinel, such that even with threading, they would have still don't a blocking call there. That said, valid points. I am curious to benchmark parts of emacs now. (I turned off most programming features, since most of my code is remote and the network at home kills me.)

> Do you know what makes it freeze?

For Gnus it was using the built-in fetchers like nnrss, which would block the Emacs process until downloads finished. Using a cron job to fetch RSS feeds avoided this, but it would still take a while to check for updates even from local files. This was around 2012, so Gnus might have improved since.

FYI my current setup is described at http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-01-14-rss_to_maildir.html