[erlang-questions] erlang for programming a text editor

[Steve Vinoski]

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 3:20 AM, Alpar Juttner
<ajuttner.list@REDACTED>wrote:

> An editor like emacs does not need multicore, but it _does_ need
> concurrency, as it could provide much better responsiveness. When emacs
> blocks for a couple of seconds, it is already annoying. When it blocks
> for tens of seconds, it can be a considerable pain.
>

I use a package called emacs-jabber for doing IM from within emacs.

<http://emacs-jabber.sourceforge.net/>

I've never had it block emacs on me. When I started looking into how it was
doing event handling, I found that it uses something called fsm.el:

<http://www.mail-archive.com/gnu-emacs-sources@gnu.org/msg00308/fsm.el>

which has the following interesting comment near the top of the source code:

;; fsm.el is an exercise in metaprogramming inspired by gen_fsm of
;; Erlang/OTP.  It aims to make asynchronous programming in Emacs Lisp
;; easy and fun.  By "asynchronous" I mean that long-lasting tasks
;; don't interfer with normal editing.

It's based on gen_fsm -- we've come full circle. :-)

More emacs packages should make use of this to avoid blocking.

--steve