Re: Are Perl6 threads preemptive or cooperative?

At 12:51 PM 8/25/00 -0500, David L. Nicol wrote:
>Dan Sugalski wrote:
> >
> > At 02:49 AM 8/25/00 -0400, Steven W McDougall wrote:
> > >Are Perl6 threads preemptive or cooperative?
> >
> > Perl 6 threads will use the native threading system on each platform. To do
> > otherwise means an enourmous amount of mostly useless work. It's just not
> > worth it.
>
>Nonsense.
>
>If we write the LCD case (works on a nonthreaded architecture)
>using cooperative threads that each yield after so many morae, (like my
>vaporware emulator does) the fake virtual threads can map to OS threads
>as allowed per architecture, and it becomes a porting issue rather than a
>language capability issue.

Writing a threads package correctly is a non-trivial thing to do. (Look at 
how many systems took forever to get it right, and some still haven't) It 
takes a lot of work, and a lot of thought, and it *still* needs some 
platform-specific code to work right.

Perl doesn't currently run on a system that doesn't have a reasonably good 
threading library. Writing our own code would mean dedicating a few 
programmer-months to do poorly what other folks have spent quite a few 
programmer-years to do well. (Or at least less poorly... :)

					Dan

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Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
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