Re: [Caml-list] Why systhreads?

[Lauri Alanko <la@iki.fi>]

On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 11:01:33AM +0100, Xavier Leroy wrote:
> One aspect of wisdom is to know when not to do something oneself, but
> leave it to others.  Scheduling I/O and computation concurrently, and
> managing process stacks, is the job of the operating system.  Trying
> to do it entirely in a user-mode program is just not reasonable.

Nevertheless that is the way many language implementations do it, mainly
because their idea of what a thread should look like and how it should
be used differs from what eg. Posix threads (or at least their common
implementations) provide. Pthreads are just too heavy.

So if I understand correctly, benefits of user-level threads include:

* Thread creation speed (no context switches)
* Minimal memory footprint
* Flexibility (eg. inter-thread exceptions)

whereas using system threads gives us:

* Ease of implementation
* Better handling of blocking functions in foreign libraries

Now this is of course a matter of taste, but I'd say that the former
weighs much more than the latter. The problems with gethostbyname can be
averted even with user-level threads (the standard way is spawning an
external server process for each gethostbyname call), whereas there's no
way to get the benefits of user-level threads while using system
threads (short of writing one's own threading system, which is also
pretty much impossible unless you have at least continuations...)

Thankfully it seems like system threads will be much lighter at least in
Linux 2.6...


Lauri Alanko
la@iki.fi
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