Re: scm_i_fraction_reduce thread safety

[Rob Browning]

Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:

> I don't have one ready, but I do very much want to have one before
> 1.8.  I need to decide for myself whether I would want to go for
> full concurrency or for restricting us to a one-thread-at-a-time
> model.
>
> Full concurrency is not a nice-model to program for,
> one-thread-at-a-time wont be able to take advantage of multiple
> processors.

Though I can't actually say *how* we'd do it, another conceptual
arrangement might be to allow an interpreter per-posix-thread.  It's
certainly not as transparent as full concurrency, and unless there
were some reasonable way to have all the interpreters share a heap/GC
without heading right back into the problems related to
full-concurrency, then people would have to structure their solutions
to explicitly pass data between interpreters.

Again, though, I haven't thought about this enough to have any real
idea if this is even remotely feasible.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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