Re: Threads

From: William Kempf (sirwillard_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-08-18 14:13:56

--- In boost_at_[hidden], brent verner <brent_at_r...> wrote:
> On 18 Aug 2000 at 15:21 (-0000), William Kempf wrote:
> | --- In boost_at_[hidden], "Levente Farkas" <lfarkas_at_o...> wrote:
> | > --- In boost_at_[hidden], "William Kempf" <sirwillard_at_m...> 
wrote:
> | 
> | > first of all I think we realy need a _good_ C++ (which means 
real 
> | c++)
> | > thread library.
> | 
> | I think we all agree, though there may be some disagreement as to 
> | what "real C++" means.  I think we've got a good start though.  
> | Jeremy Siek has several documents on thread concepts that we've 
been 
> | discussing (ask him for the URL... since it's on his own site and 
> | we're still modifying them often I won't personally give them 
out).  
> | I've also got a full Win32 implementation of the primitives that 
> | exist so far and we'd be happy to share the code with anyone 
> | interested.
> 
> I've seen his site, and would like to see what you have going. I've 
> done pthreads enough to probably be able to port your code pretty 
> quickly as long as there isn't any major conceptual disparity with
> pthreads' behavior(, and I can sneak in the time to hack some c++ :)

I'm familiar enough with pthreads to know that it should be an easy 
port.  However, I've just discovered that we have a pretty serious 
flaw in the condition class design that I'd like to shore up before 
anyone attempts a port from my implementation (it should also be 
noted that Jeremy and some others have their own implementations that 
vary from mine to one degree or another, and they've used thread 
libraries other than Win32 as the basis).

The problem with the CV is that we've only insured that the 
associated mutex is locked in the call to wait() but not in the call 
to notify().  It would be nice if we could have some manner in which 
we can insure that we've locked the mutex at compile time for both of 
these, though I think we'll likely have to settle for an exception at 
run time.  If you've seen Jeremy's documentation maybe you have some 
thoughts on this?

Bill Kempf