Possible language changes

[Ben Hutchings]

Doug Lea wrote:
> > 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?

I'm here to contribute whatever help I can, though I suspect that may
not be much.  I've worked on some simple threading layers for web
servers and other applications, and on the Win32 thread support for
Hans's garbage collector.  (By the way, Hans, I think I have a safe way
of keeping thread information on a linked list now.  I shall try to
remember to send you a patch this week.  I think it needs some work to
cope with the lack of some functions on older versions of Windows,
though.)  So I'm interested both in threading APIs and in lock-free
synchronisation, but I'm not much of an expert.

To answer your question, I'm perfectly happy with what you and Kevlin
have come up with between you.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Theory and practice are closer in theory than in practice.
                                - John Levine, moderator of comp.compilers