Re: [Caml-list] Why systhreads?

[Christopher Quinn <cq@htec.demon.co.uk>]

amazingly the threading of caml was done back in '93!
here is the paper on it:
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/publi/concurrent-gc.ps.gz

but the runtime of the current distro is not so threaded. parallelism is limited to those system functions (for I/O) in the C source files you see surrounded by enter_blocking_section()/leave_blocking_section().
these functions mask whether a new, real thread is created for the duration of the call, or the descriptor is given to select() in the case of bytecode. i think they enforce the 'global lock' on the runtime.

i imagine the performance cost of threading the runtime is rather too high (just what is it that makes java so slow anyway - a multitude of resource locks? )
 
my particular wish is to see the runtime with a compile option to eliminate static global state (make it thread local?) to enable multiple instances of the runtime to operate in the same address space, albeit completely independently.

- chris

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