Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1998 17:18:27 +0300 (IDT) From: Eli Zaretskii To: Morten Welinder cc: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Ispell and pipes In-Reply-To: <199807221318.PAA23691@tyr.diku.dk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Morten Welinder wrote: > Eli's idea under Windows might be workable. Using device drivers > is a bit drastic, but a file version seems doable: I am actually playing with the file-based idea for some time, precisely because it can be used as a more-or-less doable prototype. Armed with such prototype, we could use it as a testbed for all the basic machinery that needs to be written to make this a viable solution (all those functions like `fork', `pipe', `wait', `kill' that can at least send a SIGINT to the subprocess, and the async subprocesses support in Emacs, for those who care ;-). Changing the low-level machinery of how the interprocess communications work should be relatively easy after that, if we find the file-based solution unsatisfactory. The main advantage of using Windows multiprocessing is (IMHO) that this aspect is one of the most tested and debugged parts of Windows. For example, I routinely run several DJGPP applications at once, each one of which needs many megabytes of RAM, and I have yet to see Windows crash. After all, the first versions of Windows were nothing more than a protected-mode DOS multi-tasker. The GUI and all the rest was added much later, and is much more crappy (again IMHO). > Pipes aren't bi-directional -- but programs like ispell will be > connected using two. Sure, that's what I meant. We need a working `pipe' library function.