Re: Does Guile have a thread limit?

[Taylan Ulrich Bayırlı /Kammer]

address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Hi,
>
> Thanks for looking into it!
>
> However, I see two issues:
>
>   1. We can’t really change ‘scm_with_guile’, because it’s a public
>      function, and it’s been there “forever”.

OK, I expected this.  We could just make that one abort then, and keep
the exception in `call-with-new-thread' and similar.  (Or are there
other plausible ways to signal an error in C, other than return value
and error-pointer argument?)

>   2. Fundamentally, there should be no limit other than that imposed by
>      the OS (or hardware resources) on the number of threads.
>
> Doug Evans (hi! :-)) was looking at signal-handling code, suggesting he
> may come up with another implementation of signal-handling that does not
> involve the current signal delivery machinery.
>
> That machinery happens to also be the root of the problem at hand,
> because it mandates this pipe between newly-created threads and the
> signal-delivery thread.
>
> So I think this is really the way to go.

After that change is done, will we be able to guarantee that thread
initialization is *always* successful?  I see that the return value of
pthread_create() is already handled, so if we can guarantee that
everything happening after it will always succeed in initializing the
created thread, then this propagation of errors is indeed redundant.

Taylan