[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Comments on SRFI-39
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 08:16:06 -0800 (PST)
From: bear <bear@xxxxxxxxx>
Are winding continuations a la R5RS *compatible* with threads?
I don't understand. It is easy to implement non-preemptive threads
in R5RS using winding continuations. Given some form of timer
interrupt you can do preemptive threads. How can a program written
in R5RS be incompatible with it?
Problems only appear when you try to weave threads into the existing
R5RS mechanisms, as the combined SRFI 18 and SRFI 39 do, instead of
either building threads on top of R5RS or making them an orthogonal
To me it looks like if you have non-blocking I/O and call/cc with
winding continuations, you don't need threads.
Sure, because you can use them to implement threads.
And if you want
dynamic state maintained for safety by winding continuations, you
can't have threads of the kind you're talking about without some
fundamentally new state-maintenance operations that can handle
arbitrary multiple points of program execution simultaneously.
The problem is with the state, not with the continuations or the
winding. If you share state between threads you needs some form of
synchronization mechanism. This is not news.