[cpp-threads] Re: Thread API interface tweaks

[Bronek Kozicki]

Alexander Terekhov <alexander.terekhov at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/31/06, Peter Dimov <pdimov at mmltd.net> wrote:
> [...]
>> 5. Microsoft platforms will, hopefully, gain an official POSIX
>> threads implementation.
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/unix/sfu/pthreads0.mspx
> I think it's even free (as in beer :-) ).

it's "Microsoft plaftorm" in rather limited sense. The purpose of SFU is 
to facilitate porting of Unix programs so that they could run on Windows 
computers. It does it through installing another subsystem, running side 
by side with Win32 API subsystem. Subsystem in Windows world is a set of 
system API available to user-mode programs, as opposed to so called 
native APIs available to kernel-mode programs only, and Win32 API is the 
only subsystem guaranteed to be available on all Windows machines. SFU 
it is not an extension of Win32 API, it is wholly new API based on POSIX 
specification and existing Windows programs cannot use it (unless they 
are ported to POSIX, that is).

In other words, assumption that POSIX threading semantics is available 
to programs on Windows platform is a little too optimistic.


B.