Re: threads in 1.7.1

[Julian Graham]

If I started trolling, do you think I'd get more responses to my
question?  Just kidding.  Anyway, I know you're all busy with real
work and the like, but Marius (since I'm told this is pretty much your
domain) -- is there any reason that Guile *shouldn't* support thread
cancellation?  I was thinking maybe I'd just try to write it myself
and submit a patch, unless there was some philosophical opposition to
that idea.


On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 17:42:51 -0400, Julian Graham <address@hidden> wrote:
> First off, thanks to everyone who's working on maintaining and
> improving Guile, especially in light of this new developers' release.
> 
> I'm interested in doing some Guile stuff involving threads, and I
> wanted to know a little bit more about the changes to Guile threads in
> 1.7.x and 1.8.  The documentation doesn't seem to be quite done, so
> I'm hoping someone on this list might have the answers.
> 
> 1. Is it now possible to have more than one thread of C code make
> calls to Guile functions?  In 1.6.x, I believe it was the case that
> you had to limit yourself to a single C thread (the one that had
> called scm_boot_guile) for doing Guile stuff and have other C threads
> pass data to this thread if they needed access to Guile functionality.
> 
> 2. To what extent are Guile's Scheme threads now compatible with POSIX
> threads?  If I can somehow call pthread_cancel on a Scheme thread
> created via scm_thread_spawn, etc., will it bring disaster upon my
> program (or Guile)?
> 
> 3. Regardless of the answer to 2., are there any plans to implement
> some kind of thread cancellation interface in Guile's Scheme API?
> From looking at the 1.7.1 source, it doesn't seem to be available at
> the moment.  I know thread cancellation can always be a bit thorny,
> and I don't know what the mechanics of cancellation would be like in
> Scheme, but it'd be very useful in the project I'm using Guile in.