Re: [emms-help] emms-playing-time.el

[Jorgen Schaefer]

(Sorry for the longish delay, my webserver was down since
yesterday evening)

William XWL <address@hidden> writes:

>> It would probably be a good idea to just store the time the song
>> started, and show the playing time by calculating it from that -
>> timers aren't guaranteed to run as often as the repeat delay says.
>
> Calculating it now and then to update the playing time?

Daniel was right - just store the start time. When you have to
display the run time, you can use the difference between the
current time and the start time.

>> Imagine starting Gnus and sorting in some 20k mails or so :-)
>
> Hmm, Gnus seems to be the biggest headache for a timer,

Not at all - tramp has similar problems, or w3m while rendering a
big page, or ...

> why can't Gnus run asynchronically? because of elisp's
> constraints?

Yes. Emacs Lisp does not do real threads, so no concurrency. This
helps a lot, actually, since threads are very difficult beasts to
handle. There's an old discussion on whether Emacs should be
threaded or not. My position there is twofold. First, I think that
the introduction of threads would create more bugs than it would
bring features (Emacs Lisp just is not the right language for
useful concurrency abstractions like CML). Second, I recently came
upon a case where Emacs Lisp _does_ do concurrency, and that
should be removed.

To get back on topic, in the timer case, even threads wouldn't
help at all. Imagine a heavily loaded system. For your kind of
application, you would need a real time system. Not something you
use every day :-)

>> PS. Have you ent in your copyright assignment form? :-)
>
> Yes. I'm waiting for the really slow snail mail... 

Great, same here. :-)

Greetings,
        -- Jorgen

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