Re: Time for partial download of nnimap messages again?

[Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>]

>>>>> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>:

> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:
>>>>>>> Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann):

>>> Maybe the conservatism comes from the thing being hard to
>>> understand and not modularized as well as it could be...

>> I really think it should be redesigned to become asynchronous.

> IMHO using a framework like the URL package for backend
> communication would be good.  Perhaps even extended further to be
> more thread friendly.

With asynchronous backends, the idea is that you don't need threads.
The network traffic is powered by the event loop checking for waiting
input on sockets.

But the backend interface would need a complete restructuring: from
"request/response and then use the response to draw summary and
article buffers" to "send a callback with the request, and have the
callback draw summary and article buffers, as data arrives".

There is of course intermediates, where only the requests that
potentially take a long time are made non-blocking, and the callbacks
build up local data structures, and notify when finished, rather than
do the actual drawing.