From: Wayne Harris <wharris1@protonmail.com>
To: ding@gnus.org
Subject: Re: is there a possibility for gnus to download data without blocking?
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:18:56 -0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <868se8gjzj.fsf@protonmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87imdcvchr.fsf@ericabrahamsen.net>
Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
> Wayne Harris <wharris1@protonmail.com> writes:
>
>> Is there a possibility for gnus to download data without blocking?
>> Wouldn't it be nice to be able to keep using EMACS while Gnus is
>> downloading?
>>
>> Is it a limitation of EMACS itself? If so, is there any plans for
>> supporting such things in the future? Wouldn't it be nice?
>
> It would be lovely! There are a few issues: Emacs is single-threaded,
> though it has the ability to continue execution while waiting on IO from
> an external process. So theoretically we can already "download data
> without blocking". In fact, Gnus already does this in a limited way:
> when you hit "g", it starts an async external process for each of your
> servers (each that involves an external process, anyway), then polls
> each one until they're all done, and then continues with updating its
> state.
The fact that it uses external processes seems totally acceptable and
perhaps even desirable. I like external processes. That means I could
look at that part of the system individually using my shell.
> That means there's really only a benefit when you have multiple servers
> that can overlap their IO, and you're still going to wait as long as the
> longest server takes.
Interesting. I haven't noticed that. For example, when I say ``A A''
on the group buffer to fetch a list of all groups, I see each news
server being read one after the other. But you didn't say this should
have happened. You said when I say ``g'' and I can't really tell what
happens when I say ``g'', so I'll believe you.
> In theory we could have a Gnus that fires off all the servers and then
> returns control to the user immediately, but that would involve handling
> out-of-band returns as they came in from the servers, and Gnus would
> have to be structured very differently than it is now to manage that.
I don't expect ever to be able to download a bunch of data and have it
all very fast on my screen. But I do think that a system being always
faster than the user gives the user an impression of total control,
which is pleasurable. So I would consider that a very nice improvement
for Gnus itself.
And for EMACS, I can't see the need for anything else because if it can
poll on external processes, that is powerful enough for anything I could
think of.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-08-21 14:20 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-08-21 4:06 Wayne Harris
2020-08-21 4:39 ` Eric Abrahamsen
2020-08-21 10:31 ` dick.r.chiang
2020-08-21 17:42 ` Eric Abrahamsen
2020-08-21 14:18 ` Wayne Harris [this message]
2020-08-21 17:16 ` Eric Abrahamsen
2020-08-21 20:30 ` Wayne Harris
2020-08-22 2:27 ` Wayne Harris
2020-08-22 10:45 ` dick.r.chiang
2020-08-22 15:52 ` Wayne Harris
2020-08-22 16:11 ` dick.r.chiang
2020-08-22 17:07 ` Eric Abrahamsen
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