Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zelphirkalt 529 days ago
Concurrency is very important these days though. Yet it is an extremely hard to solve problem in Emacs, due to tons of mutable global state, ingrained for decades, very hard to convert to something that works OK when running concurrently.

I use Emacs every day. It is my editor and in general tool of choice. However, the longer the concurrency story is not improved, the more advantages do other projects accumulate, because this concurrency thing is part of everything. Even VSCode seems to be better at concurrency. What a shame.

I think the only way in Emacs to properly use multiple cores for speedup is to start external processes. Sometimes that is a natural thing to do. But one also needs to process the result of an external process. Say for example a huge git diff in a magit buffer. All that stuff needs to be rendered/fontified. Editor locks up. That's just really bad. And people discuss workarounds all the time, writing code with these limitations in mind, meaning, that this makes code more complex everywhere.