eproject

ore. I have an Emacs mode at work that saves to a special centralized database in addition to the local disk at every modification. We just queue the write in before-save hook and tell some other process to read the data from a temp file that we create. It works perfectly, even on Windows!) Rebuilding tag tables in the background This is easy and eproject already does it. You run etags in a background process and when it's done, point Emacs at the new tags tables. Since the tags tables don't do anything until a lookup is requested, this is completely asynchronous. Try it today: https://github.com/jrockway/eproject/blob/master/contrib/epr... Loading and fontifying large files in the background (i.e. concurrent fontification, not just jit-lock) This you can't do unless you can guarantee that matchers are bounded and generate correct results no matter what the boundaries are. I don't know of any programming mode that could be made to meet this invariant easily; consider the case: /* this code is bad: int i = 0; */ If we had two threads fontifying this block, and the bounds were set to thread 1 = line 1, thread 2 = line 2, the results are going to be wrong. The first line will be treated as a comment and the second line will look like a normal variable declaration because getting the correct syntax information requires analyzing the entire first line. Any language with multiline constructs (string literals, preprocessor directives, comments, etc.) will have this problem, thus making parallelization Not Easy. If font-locking is slow, profile it and fix the algorithm, but don't expect speedups for free. Parsing programs that are invalid (as most are while being typed; you type characters, not tokens) and guessing what the user "means" is hard. Concurrent url fetching and downloads (e.g. updating el-get without blocking). Fork curl or wget. Display the result when done. Or, implement HTTP from scratch; network IO is already nonblocking. Concurrent spellcheck This is already implemented this way; a pipe is opened to aspell and words are piped to aspell as necessary. If parsing the results is too expensive and you don't care about interactivity, wait for bigger batches of data back from aspell. All IO to other processes is asynchronous and can be made synchronous with special calls like accept-process-output. Fast scrolling in large buffers (especially complex XML files opened in nxml-mode) How will threads solve this problem?

flexible. The user can hook it, so he gets a fresh project REPL the first time he visits a new project. Or, he can hook the eproject-after-save hook, and commit the changes to a "backup" git branch, so that he never has to worry about not being able to undo. The idea behind Emacs is that it can do things that nobody else has ever done before, and it continually lives up to this expectation. (Also, "this is too hard for beginners". OK. Then how did I learn Emacs?)

of threads.) Persistent application framework: http://github.com/jrockway/eventful (Generic foundation for web applications, TCP servers, IRC bots, ...) Persistent command-line application framework: http://github.com/jrockway/app-persistent (Make your slow-starting Perl application start up instantly.) Path::Class replacement based on Forest::Tree::Pure: http://github.com/jrockway/data-filesystem (I also have a binding to make a Data::Filesystem tree into a FUSE filesystem.) Once this yak shaving is out of the way, I have a few applications to write: Filesytem::Kindle - plug in your Kindle and see the books as unencrypted HTML (this one is going to be released anonymously, you didn't hear this from me, I was never here...) PleasureChicken - email / im / irc message consolidator, indexer, data extractor. The idea is to let the computer read your messages for you, so you don't have to. When you buy something from Amazon, it will stick the UPS delivery date in your calendar, and remind you that you just spent $300 on your Amex. When your boss IMs you at 3am with the word "broken", play a sound. etc., etc. This might be a hosted service one day, as well. http://github.com/jrockway/pleasurechicken Angerwhale 2 - A weblog for programmers that doesn't suck. http://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale-ng (See also: http://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale for the old version.) Unfortunately, my time is being taken up by menial $work_tasks, which distracts me enough to not get much done. But that should all be ending soon.