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The main reason why emacs can't be an operating system (or at least a decent one) is that it doesn't support multi-threading. And even if you added multi-threa
by tytso 13y ago
The main reason why emacs can't be an operating system (or at least a decent one) is that it doesn't support multi-threading. And even if you added multi-threading to emacs, the fact that all of the elisp code out there has no locking and doesn't expect other threads to be modifying various data structures and buffers out from under them, means that it really can't be done at all in any kind of practical way.
- LukeShu 13y agoNo multi-tasking doesn't mean it can't be an OS, just not a decent OS. DOS was not a multi-tasking OS. Prior to ITS, the MIT AI Lab (which RMS was a member of) were opposed to multi-tasking OSs. Lack of that feature doesn't make it not an OS.