Re: [Caml-list] Why systhreads?

[Blair Zajac <blair@orcaware.com>]

Xavier Leroy wrote:
> 
> It seems that the annual discussion on threads started again.  Allow
> me to deliver again my standard lecture on this topic.
> 
> Threads have at least three different purposes:
> 
> 1- Parallelism on shared-memory multiprocessors.
> 2- Overlapping I/O and computation (while a thread is blocked on a network
>    read, other threads may proceed).
> 3- Supporting the "coroutine" programming style
>    (e.g. if a program has a GUI but performs long computations,
>     using threads is a nicer way to structure the program than
>     trying to wrap the long computation around the GUI event loop).

[Discussion on (1), (2) and (3) removed].

To summarize, for (2) system threads are required and and you can't
prevent blocking with user level threads easily or at all.  For (3),
making the Ocaml system support SMP is "Too complex; too hard to
debug" and SMP boxes aren't all that popular.

Aren't these contradictory statements?

For Ocaml to support a Ocaml program to have one thread to block on a
system call and to allow other threads to continue, doesn't this support
SMP?  Does Ocaml support this?

I need the functionality to have multiple threads where one thread can
block and not stop the others, either due to the OS or to the Ocaml
runtime system.

What am I missing here?

Best,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac <blair@orcaware.com>
Web and OS performance plots - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/
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