2014/1/4 Chris Vine <ch...@cvine.freeserve.co.uk>: > Is it efficiency concerns that make you think it unusual, or just that the > use case is unusual?
I don't think that creating a new module is particularly inefficient, and it would only become noticable if you were creating many many threads with a short lifetime. What's unusual (and I think that Mark would agree) is that you'd normally want your thread to be able to access all the definitions that are visible to the program (or: to the main thread). If a program is written in a functional style, the threads usually don't mutate their global environment -- they just read the definitions -- so any race conditions or other conflicts are unlikely. I think that your use-case is different and that you make very few assumptions on the code that the threads will execute -- in particular, that it might be a highly imperative code which does mutate its global state. If it is so, then I think that this is the right way. (Be warned, that it doesn't protect the system from malicious code -- it is still possible for a thread to modify the content of another module, but it's difficult to do that by accident) > make-fresh-user-module is not documented. It might be worth adding it > to the documentation. it definitely might ;)
