Re: wip-ports-refactor

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

Hi :)

On Sun 24 Apr 2016 13:05, Chris Vine <chris@cvine.freeserve.co.uk> writes:

> on the question of guile's thread implementation, it seems to me to be
> basically sound if you avoid obvious global state.  I have had test
> code running for hours, indeed days, without any appearance of data
> races or other incorrect behaviour on account of guile's thread
> implementation.  Global state is an issue.  Module loading (which you
> mention) is an obvious one, but other things like setting load paths
> don't look to be thread safe either.

I think we have no plans for giving up pthreads.  The problem is that
like you say, if there is no shared state, and your architecture has a
reasonable memory model (Intel's memory model is really great to
program), then you're fine.  But if you don't have a good mental model
on what is shared state, or your architecture doesn't serialize loads
and stores... well there things are likely to break.

I like to recommend solutions that will absolutely work and never crash.
(They could throw errors, but that doesn't crash Guile.)  I can't do
that with threads -- not right now anyway.  If you know what you're
doing though, go ahead and use them :)

Andy