Re: Multithreading, again and again

[Stefan Monnier]

>> I don't think there is such a consensus, but better support for
>> concurrency is something I consider important.  It is currently much too
>> difficult to implement "asynchronous article fetch" and things like that.

> "Asynchronous article fetch" could be implemented with a simpler approach
> to run code in a "sandbox" similarly to HTML5 "workers" that run
> computationally expensive scripts in the background independently of any
> user interface scripts that allows for long-running scripts to be
> executed without yielding to keep the application responsive.  More at:
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/workers.html

I must say my HTML/Javascript is between rusty and nonexistant, but
I can't see how they avoid global communication.  My best guess is that
they do the equivalent of a `fork' and then use communication via
messages (implemented over pipes or equivalent with automatic
marshalling/unmarshalling).

We could provide a `fork' primitive, indeed.


        Stefan