Re: Shrinking the C core

[Rudolf Schlatte <rudi@constantly.at>]

Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> writes:

> As for the multicore processing thing, I wonder how they
> did that? And why can't we do that as well with Elisp?

That is answered by the SBCL manual.  The first sentence of
http://sbcl.org/manual/index.html#Threading says: "SBCL supports a
fairly low-level threading interface that maps onto the host operating
system’s concept of threads or lightweight processes."

So race conditions resulting from multiple threads modifying Lisp data
structures concurrently are entirely the programmer's responsibility in
SBCL, to be handled by using the provided standard tools (mutexes,
locks, condition variables etc).  So if you create an application in CL,
you have to check that the libraries you use are thread-safe.  For
Emacs, where multiple applications and libraries are assembled into an
editor by the end user, instead of a programmer creating one application
to be run in isolation in an SBCL image, I believe this approach will
not work.