[db48x]

Most of what Emacs does just won’t benefit from massive parallelism. CPUs are ridiculously fast at processing text (AVX2 instructions can process vectors of 32 bytes at a time), and most of the stuff that _can_ benefit from parallelism should just be moved to an external process. For example, querying your compiler for a list of methods that apply to the current object, or a list of functions that start with “Foo” are mostly moving to external processes using LSP as the communication protocol. It would be nice for some things to use background threads, like Gnus polling your IMAP server for email, and Emacs does have the threading mechanisms to handle that now. It’s just a matter of time before someone does the work :)

[the-lazy-guy]

I disagree. When I am running a compilation (with output being dumped into a visible buffer) + query magit for large commit. Over tramp. Things noticeably freeze. Technically it all is async. Practically, it is implemented as polling things on main thread with some witing happening in non-async fashion.

> For example, querying your compiler for a list of methods that apply to the current object, or a list of functions that start with “Foo” are mostly moving to external processes using LSP as the communication protocol.

That's why we have lsp-bridge and lsp-mode emacs fork :) Both of which build some infrastructure to avoid doing communication work with lsp-mode work in main emacs thread. So, heavy emacs users are building some async machinery which wraps another already async and relatively lightweight protocol, because core emacs facilities can't keep up with it. Architecturally it is kind of insane.

I think, lsp-mode fork is doing the right thing (from practical POV; it goes against "emacs is just an elisp interpreter" ideology though) and hope it gets into core at some point. A better solution would have being having first class async and background threads support at the elisp level. Which would never happen due to elisp messiness.

https://github.com/emacs-lsp/emacs https://github.com/manateelazycat/lsp-bridge

[comfypotato]

Hey! Exactly the response I was looking for. Thanks for this.

Your response reminded me of an Intel project about regular expressions. I think it’s called hyperscan, but I’m not sure. It’s a regex engine (I think that’s the correct terminology) that makes dedicated use of very specific Intel instructions to reach incredible regex speeds on Intel processors. Would be cool if Emacs could make use of this tech when configured properly. I bet there are some internals that rely on regex.

[ykonstant]

Does emacs use specialized instruction sets like AVX2?

[db48x]

Alas, no. But the power is right there, all we have to is stretch forth our hands and use it.

[lallysingh]

Ha! No. Native compilation just snuck in a little while ago. SIMD will take... longer.