Re: [PATCH 03/10] introduce systhread layer

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>>> I'd also like to do a "no threads" port that will turn most things
>>> into no-ops, and have thread-creation fail.  I was thinking perhaps
>>> I'd make a future (provide 'threads) conditional on threads actually
>>> working.  Thoughts on this?
> Unless there's a platform where the support isn't possible, I'd suggest not
> doing this last bit, so that Emacs code (both Lisp and C) can assume threads
> are available.

Agreed.

>> like GNU Pth or Windows fibers in order to avoid OS-level context
>> switch overhead.

Thread-switching performance won't be good until we can get rid of the
unwind&rewind of the let-bindings-stack, so "avoid OS-level context
switch overhead" won't bring us any measurable benefit, I think.

> Where every I/O operation needs to be rewritten to call some helper function
> that do the thread switching?

No: for the foreseeable future, the concurrency won't provide any
parallelism at all, so thread-switching will only happen at those few
points were we already allow async operations (sit-for,
accept-process-output and a few more).  So there's no need to make wrap
all I/O operations.


        Stefan