Possible language changes

[Doug Lea]

Boehm, Hans wrote:
> I agree with Doug.  But I think it would be much harder still to
> standardize the higher layers in C++, since we have such a diverse
> set of existing interfaces, some of which are very heavily used:
> 
 > ...

I believe that all of these at least have some basic notion
of a thread.

Plea for help: Doug Schmidt and/or others. Could you sketch out
a candidate Thread class?

My guess is that ACE, Boost, uC++ and others have enough commonality
that this might actually be possible in a non-controversial
way, which would at least give us layer 2.5. Which would
provide some incremental progress without having to agree
on higher-level programming models.

Ideally, this class would make no mention of locking.

One open issue that we might be able to settle quickly is
how exception mechanics fit in with this (i.e., mainly, what
happens when one thread abruptly terminates with exception).
I think uC++ has a good story to tell about it.

-Doug