Re: Questions about throw-on-input

[Alexander Miller]

[I had to copy the In-Reply-To header from the page source because the
reply-to button
wouldn't set it, so let's hope I'm doing this right.]

Incidentally I have recently been playing around with a similar idea -
to use a worker thread
to split and run long tasks in the background. Here's what I came up
with so far:

(defconst worker-mutex (make-mutex "*WORKER MUTEX*"))
(defconst worker-cond-var (make-condition-variable worker-mutex))
(defvar worker-queue (list))

(setf
 worker
 (make-thread
  (lambda ()
    (while t
      (while worker-queue
        (let* ((work-unit (pop worker-queue))
               (fn (car work-unit))
               (args (cdr work-unit)))
          (apply fn args)
          (thread-yield)))
      (with-mutex worker-mutex
        (condition-wait worker-cond-var))))
  "*WORKER*"))

(setf worker-timer
      (run-with-idle-timer
       1 t (lambda ()
             (when worker-queue
               (with-mutex worker-mutex
                 (condition-notify worker-cond-var))))))

(push (list #'shell-command-to-string "notify-send 'Hello' 'World!'")
worker-queue)
(push (list #'message "Hello %s!" "World") worker-queue)
(push (list #'call-interactively #'treemacs) worker-queue)

Get enough thread-yield or input-pending checks into the work the thread
is doing and
you might just be able to get around blocking the UI despite having
plenty to do.