Subject: Re: the evil of continuations
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 2000/06/21
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3170590392650958@naggum.no>

* Michael Sperber
| Unfortunately, OS threads are often *way* too heavyweight for the
| really interesting applications of threads.

* Tim Bradshaw
| unfortunately, unless you use the OS-supplied threads you'll never run
| on a multiprocessor.

  Whatever happened to good old interprocess communication, shared
  memory, etc, on multiprocessor systems?  Whatever it is people are
  doing with threads can be handled without involving any kernel.
  There need be no particularly complicated implementation, either.
  At issue, however, is whether it makes sense to write languages and
  runtime systems that maintain the threads and surrounding support or
  hack things by hand in what passes for the "popular" languages.

  I'm sorry, but I completely fail to understand why OS threads is the
  only way to utilize "modern" multiprocessor systems.  Maybe I'm just
  too old to be able to pretend we didn't have SMPs in the 1980's.

#:Erik, sighing
-- 
  If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.