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Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

It seems amazing to me that EMACS is just now getting ready to implement multi-threading.

Isn't that so 1990's?

Please I mean no disrespect...I was first exposed to EMACS in the late 80's if I remember correctly and have followed it's growth over the many years since, but I can't help but feel that introducing non-blocking threading is something that should have happened long ago.

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I never noticed that it didn't have threads and I've been using it for 10+ years. That might explain why they didn't bother adding them - it works reasonably well as is

I notice a couple times a day. Any large mode will usually cause noticeable jankiness. My usual suspects are js2-mode, email modes like gnus, and evaluating org-src blocks.

There's hacks for some of these, but having threads natively will be really nice.

the main need for threads is a non blocking ui...another example of a very extensible software with a ui that locks at any step because of how extensible it is, is kodi :p

Emacs is little outdated as an operating system, but highly advanced as an text editor.

Keep in mind that from an architectural perspective, Emacs is mostly a LISP interpreter, with a text editor implemented in it. As such, not only did it involve refactoring application code, but the core language as well.

Emacs does have some other means for asynchronous processing, like processes and timers etc., but yes, maybe threads might have come earlier. The development pace of emacs in the recent years is way more faster than it used to be though, maybe with vim and Emacs alike becoming hip again and gaining traction (new cool stuff like Org mode, Magit, etc.) (and also new cool lisps like Clojure).

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