Re: Boost.Thread and Mac OS

From: williamkempf_at_[hidden]
Date: 2001-10-19 08:54:51

--- In boost_at_y..., Darin Adler <darin_at_b...> wrote:
> on 10/18/01 4:01 PM, Brian Sharpe at brian_at_p... wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone know if the library has been ported to
> > MacOS native threads?
> > not just MacOSX but earlier MacOS versions?  (eg 8,9)
> 
> It hasn't.
> 
> > I've been pulling my hair out trying to find a truly cross-
platform
> > simple threading library that is ported to MacOS aswell as 
Unix/Win32.
> 
> For threads in Mac OS before Mac OS X, you have two main choices
> <http://developer.apple.com/macos/multiprocessing.html>. The 
Macintosh
> Thread Manager gives you co-operative multitasking, which might not 
fit the
> Boost.Thread library abstraction well. The Multiprocessing API would
> probably fit the Boost.Thread model pretty well, but there are some 
pretty
> severe restrictions on what parts of the Mac OS you can use from 
threads
> other than the main one.

It's not been done yet, but Boost.Threads had it's interface designed 
to support co-operative threading models.  The boost::thread::yield() 
method is the key to this.  I can't, however, comment as to whether 
this was enough to allow MacOS native co-operative threads for the 
implementation.  And writing portable code to work on platforms that 
use both models will be tricky even if the interface supports it.

> It might be a good project to adapt Boost.Thread to one or both of 
these
> models, but it's definitely not already done.

It would be great to see this done.

Bill Kempf