Re: [9fans] "Blocks" in C

[David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com>]

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On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 2:49 PM, David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 2:45 PM, David Leimbach <leimy2k@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 2:35 PM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu Sep  3 17:09:01 EDT 2009, rvs@sun.com wrote:
>>> > Anything can be done using regular C and threads. The trick here
>>> > is to make everything *scalable* and *painless* enough so that
>>> > mere mortals can start benefiting from parallelism in their code.
>>> >
>>> > The other trick here is to find a model that makes things *natural*,
>>> and
>>> > that means practically no explicit locking, less shared state, etc.
>>> >
>>> > The search for the model is meaningless unless it is used for
>>> > solving *practical* challenges. In that respect, one of my
>>> > favorite article is how implementation of a chess engine
>>> > influenced Cilk framework (which almost has the notion of a "block")
>>> >    http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/icca99.pdf
>>> >
>>> > Read it, I don't think we can be on the same page (and escape the
>>> > armchair philosophy trap) unless we are talking about practical
>>> > applications of the framework.
>>> >
>>> > Look at the chess example -- can the same be done with pure C? Sure!
>>> > Did Cilk make it less painful? Absolutely!
>>>
>>> my question was, what's naming your function pointers
>>> or not got to do with locking?  i'm asking about the language
>>> construct, not the library er i mean "framework" and maybe runtime
>>> that goes with it.
>>>
>>>
>> Maybe if you see the block implementation you wouldn't think it was merely
>> naming a function pointer?
>>
>> http://clang.llvm.org/docs/BlockImplementation.txt
>>
>>
> also
>
> {
>  int X;
>  call_a_block(^(int y) {print (X+y); });
> }
>
> The block has a snapshot of that stack variable "X".
>
> It really does work a bit more like a closure than a function pointer.
>
> Dave
>

Also this doc is the spec: http://clang.llvm.org/docs/BlockLanguageSpec.txt

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>> Dave
>>
>>
>>> - erik
>>>
>>>
>>
>

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