On Sat, 03 Jan 2004 20:51, Luke Palmer wrote;
> Parrot is platform-independent, but that doesn't mean we can't
> take advantage of platform-specific instructions to make it faster
> on certain machines. Indeed, this is precisely what JIT is. > But a lock on every PMC is still pretty heavy for those non-x86
> platforms out there, and we should avoid it if we can.
So implement threading on architectures that don't support interrupt masking with completely user-space threading (ie, runloop round-robin) like Ruby does. *That* is available on *every* platform.
Interrupt masking and a proper threading interface can be considered a prerequisite for threads of any sort under Parrot, the same way an ANSI C89-compliant compiler is a requirement. Platforms that can't muster at least thread spawning, mutexes, and condition variables don't get threads, and don't have to be considered. (You can, it's just not required, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anything outside the embedded realm that doesn't support at least that level of functionality, and I'm OK if there are no threads on the Gameboy port)
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
