On Tue, Jan 09, 2001 at 11:44:55PM +0000, Alan Burlison wrote:
> The downside is that we would restrict perl6 to only those platform that
> supported threads. I'm not sure how much of a restriction this would
> turn out to be in practice - how many current perl platforms don't have
> threads?
As mentioned previously Acorn's RISC OS doesn't
However, I've just had a talker session and got a tutorial from the guy
who wrote their Java implementation on how to write a threading library
that would run command line programs. (specifically the tricky bits of
how to swap thread context, and how to do this while being pre-empted
inside the desktop without crashing everyone else)
We didn't get to "how to do this and also be able to thread while
displaying windows of your own in the desktop" because he can't remember
offhand how he was going to do this for the general case)
(java does do it, but as it's all going through Java's windowing library,
the implementation know where the windowing system calls are going to be)
Upshot is that threading can be written if need be, so that's one less
(admittedly now obscure) platform that isn't excluded by threading.
Nicholas Clark
