Hello, I'm interested in the possibility of concurrency as a well supported feature of Yi, since I view that as one the of primary limitations of emacs at present. I see there is https://github.com/yi-editor/yi/issues/513 which seems to indicate that there is some interest on the part of others.
I'd like to hear if anyone has thoughts about what the semantics of such a thing would be. I am familiar with haskell generally but not concurrency specifically. The main issue that comes up in emacs discussions of proper concurrency (aside from dealing with legacy code and backwards compatibility) is how to handle all the heavyweight state of the editor (buffer contents, cursors, window-buffer relationships, etc). Should they have exclusive ownership passed about between threads/coroutines, should they be totally open, free to mutate at your own risk? The benefits I see with some sort of ownership model is that it lets you write your code without that much mental strain, since if you have what you are interested in, then you can act on it freely. The issue (in Rust-ish situations) is controlling who has what when is just as complicated as the problem of safe shared access that you sidestep with ownership. The emacs-ish world of a single executing sequence that jumps between lines of work is generally fairly reasonable to make correct, but often leads to lag on the user end as typing a character has to wait for the current thread to yield, which it may not do immediately. Obviously pure computations can be done truly in parallel, but in my experience it's pretty rare that the thing you want an editor thread for is pure. Even switching to a different buffer to write some info (think display-time-mode in emacs) is enough to be noticeable in some cases. There might be some sort of happy medium where one allows data races on things like buffer contents, run concurrent things in parallel at least some of the time, and have each executor have its own cursor, active buffer, etc. That way at least if the user and the thread are typing in different buffers they should be largely unbothered (but info could appear when the user looks over at the other window, for example). Apologies for the ramble. Ill defined or not I've found myself wanting more than once for something like this in emacs (mostly in exwm), but the problem seems basically futile in a project that has that much inertia. Let me know if there is a model for this sort of behavior that would be reasonable, and if it is even remotely feasible in the current Yi code. Thanks, Thomas -- Yi development mailing list yi-devel@googlegroups.com http://groups.google.com/group/yi-devel --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "yi.devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to yi-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/yi-devel/9hY-L3PpXFsqN9_BgkHLuHaiQ7LuUxlPrjCp3MMdayZ87oG-HmF4Bgfco1Rx8X0jF29gfnctna4uKEo7rZHvsclwpg6CEvcc2mtrzOUiDvQ%3D%40proton.me.
