Re: What is the most useful potential feature which Emacs lacks?

[Arthur Miller]

ndame <address@hidden> writes:

> There is a discussion on Reddit about sponsoring development of 
> multithreading in Emacs, and people there say it's too hard, takes a lot of 
> time and it doesn't even
> bring that much benefit to the user.
>
> If this is the case (is it?) then what are those other features which could 
> bring much more tangible benefits for the user and assuming somebody works on 
> them full time
> sponsored by the community they can be implemented in, say,  a few months?
Maybe a better support for graphics? Let people draw in Emacs window (on
GUi clients). It could benefit some org mode features, some poeple who
does uml via ditaa or similar, powerline users etc. Emacs could be used
in a similar fashion like Conky (system monitoring tool), for those that
use Emacs as a daemon, and could even make Emacs more of a office style
application for some people.

Could also benefit some UI stuff, for example drawing on screen could
benefit more mouse/touch interface so one day Emacs could get a "tablet
ui" or something.

Could be done by exposing underlaying OS/Widget Kit drawing (Cairo, X11,
Gdk, whatever Macs have) to draw directly on Emacs frame/either window
or buffer based. Could also be done by drawing to an "image" (in memory)
via say Cairo surface, XPixmap etc, and then displaying that image in
overlays as Emacs already do.

Could be nice with some task-based parallelism too, like Intel's TBB
does. TBB has Apache license, I am not so legal so I don't know if it is
compatible with GPL, so no idea if it is just opensource or free ...