Possible language changes

[Boehm, Hans]

> From: Doug Lea [mailto:dl at cs.oswego.edu] 
> 
> > We could still ignore it.  On the other hand, it's a widely used 
> > system, which seems to be supported by most vendor 
> compiler, which has 
> > an open source implementation, and which seems to share the 
> problems 
> > we're addressing.
> 
> I don't want to argue this point, but it seems to me that 
> defining a Thread class (or something similar) would not in 
> the least bit HURT OpenMP; they would use it at most only 
> under the covers rather than explicitly incorporating it.
Agreed.  The question is whether a "standard" Thread
class would be a benefit, or really just increase the number
of "standards" from N to N+1.

> 
> > 
> > What's the problem we're trying to address here?
> 
> The ability to write a concurrent program and be confident 
> that it will run on any C++ platform? Again, I'm  not the 
> right person to try to guage exactly what that should entail.
But we presumably need a synchronization mechanism for that, too?
In fact, if we had a standard synchronization mechanism even without the
threads class, we could write portable libraries.  But the
synchronization
mechanism seems to be where we're unlikely to get agreement.

(Aside: I'm not sure whether the two Dougs really agree on the
cancellation interface either.  Java interruption is never asynchronous
in the pthread sense.  I'm not sure whether Doug Schmidt really
wanted that.  I suspect that agreeing on a thread class would also
be nontrivial.)
> 
> 
> > Is it purely a
> > specification issue in that it seems strange to talk about threads 
> > without having a defined way of introducing them? If so, 
> does it make 
> > more sense to cast this as defining something like a 
> "futures" library 
> > package, which gives you access to concurrency, but doesn't really 
> > claim to be anyone's basic threads library?
> 
> That would be OK by me too. The people who care most about 
> what Thread-like APIs look like should make this call -- My 
> understanding is that this is the main reason why Doug S., 
> Kevlin, Ben, and Peter are even on this list. What do you guys think?
Yes, please.

Hans