Re: [Chicken-users] Posix threading

[Toby Butzon]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 11:26:00PM +0000, Julian Morrison wrote:
> Perhaps Posix threaded programs could work, provided they only rely upon 
> "evicted" shared data?
> 
> Posix threads are good because (1) they allow blocking kernel calls to 
> only block one thread (2) they take full advantage of multiple CPUs, 
> hyperthreading processors, etc.

I'm new to "real" Scheme programming[1], but I'm quite surprised
that it doesn't use posix/native threading. It seems like a wacky
idea to have threads that can't be scheduled on separate CPUs, or
worse, that block the entire process on a blocking system call
(surprising since this is one of the major ways threads are used
in other languages).

Apologies in advance if these are stupid questions, but what am I
missing? Are threads just not used the same way in Scheme as in
other languages (for, say, a simple webserver, I can't imagine not
using threads)? Is it really better/easier/something else to implement
user-space runtime threading, but not use posix threads? Is it just
that scheme semantics make it hard?

If there's related reading out there, I'd love to hear about it.

[1] I'm a student at Georgia Tech, where they taught Intro to CS
for a couple of years using HtDP and DrScheme. So that got me
interested. Now I'm just trying to exercise it and learn more. :)

-- TB