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I built a GPU back end for Emacs

en.andros.dev

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Re: I built a GPU back end for Emacs

#111
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find that branch here - https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git Am I looking in the wrong place?

https://github.com/tanrax/emacs-gpu/tree/wayland-pgtk-backen... The main emacs-gpu branch doesn't have wayland support.

Oh thanks! I thought they meant this was going on in the real emacs man.

Re: I built a GPU back end for Emacs

#112
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because it was not multi-threaded I'm honestly curious, what kind of multi-threading you use, in whatever you're using now instead of Emacs? Can you share some practical example(s)? I'm not trying to trick you, I'm just curious for what kind of complex tasks possible there and where Emacs comes short.

I fetch my google calendar every few minutes to get everything into my agenda. The API request is async, but writing to the calendar file and some additional processing made Emacs hang for 10 seconds at a time. The LLM-inspired solution was to spawn entire new emacs processes to do the work in the background. It's pretty cool that it works, but it feels like it shouldn't - and wouldn't with 2+ threads - have been tha…

Ah, so for stuff like that, it seems current strategy is to build a "server" part that handles concurrency (in a different language) - that's how lsp servers work, and projects like eca-emacs. If I ever get to build something like what you've described I'd probably write the server part in Clojure, Janet, Jank or Jolt¹ or maybe even Zig or Rust. It is a nice, practical example - exactly the stuff I've been asking about, thank you for providing it. I agree, it would be nicer if this kind of stuff was possible without complicated hacks.

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¹ https://github.com/jolt-lang/jolt

Re: I built a GPU back end for Emacs

#113

Interesting improvement. My biggest issue with Emacs and the reason that I left it was because it was not multi-threaded. I wonder if is/can be multi-threaded now.

> because it was not multi-threaded I'm honestly curious, what kind of multi-threading you use, in whatever you're using now instead of Emacs? Can you share some practical example(s)? I'm not trying to trick you, I'm just curious for what kind of complex tasks possible there and where Emacs comes short.

The main one was C++ intellisense on a large codebase. It felt unusable due to the single threaded bottleneck. Mind you, this was a decade ago or more by now.

Re: I built a GPU back end for Emacs

#114
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because it was not multi-threaded I'm honestly curious, what kind of multi-threading you use, in whatever you're using now instead of Emacs? Can you share some practical example(s)? I'm not trying to trick you, I'm just curious for what kind of complex tasks possible there and where Emacs comes short.

I fetch my google calendar every few minutes to get everything into my agenda. The API request is async, but writing to the calendar file and some additional processing made Emacs hang for 10 seconds at a time. The LLM-inspired solution was to spawn entire new emacs processes to do the work in the background. It's pretty cool that it works, but it feels like it shouldn't - and wouldn't with 2+ threads - have been tha…

How do you sync your google calendar with org-agenda?

Re: I built a GPU back end for Emacs

#115
Also done by master incal and his faithful sidekick cognitive efti, some time ago, with industry standard methods: Elisp/C/SDL3/OpenGL/GLSL/GPU.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1rasjwf/elgpu/

https://dataswamp.org/~incal/el-gpu/

Big thread on devel as well also 'forgetting' to mention it eheh? Well, now then :)

Re: I built a GPU back end for Emacs

#116

Aside from the wonderful contribution to Emacs, I have the utmost respect for how straight-forward you were with the 100% LLM generated code. The enlightening conversation on GPU freedom that ensued was also informative.

I really appreciated this too. Such a contrast with a similar article from someone offended because their "honesty" caused a patch to be rejected.

Re: I built a GPU back end for Emacs

#117
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fetch my google calendar every few minutes to get everything into my agenda. The API request is async, but writing to the calendar file and some additional processing made Emacs hang for 10 seconds at a time. The LLM-inspired solution was to spawn entire new emacs processes to do the work in the background. It's pretty cool that it works, but it feels like it shouldn't - and wouldn't with 2+ threads - have been tha…

How do you sync your google calendar with org-agenda?

org-gcal … bit of a pain getting the Google API config right but so far so good.
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