[JDEV] Q: Has any other threading library been considered?

[N. Sean Timm]

I've been messing around with the Jlib stuff on Windows 2000 most of the
night trying to come as close as possible to a succesful compile.  I ran
into what I believe were several cross-platform issues that just hadn't been
handled yet.  However, I've never been actively involved in an open-source,
cross-platform project before, so I could be mistaken (or could have made
mistakes during modification), but I've got several modified source files.
What should I do with them?

Back to the point:
Now I have, of course, run into the dreaded PTH dependency (dreaded on the
Windows platform, at least).  I surfed around and noticed several other
freely available cross-platform threading libraries, and I'm wondering if
any of these have been considered, or if there are specific reasons that PTH
is being used and others won't be considered.  I saw several alternatives
out there.  One, Jlib could be modified to use a standard pthread library
(or the pthread API through PTH).  Cygnus has released a pthread library for
Win32 (http://sourceware.cygnus.com/pthreads-win32/) that we could then
(hopefully) use seamlessly as long as we stuck to supported functions (it's
not fully implemented, but it would depend on which pieces of functionality
we needed).

Another possibility is APE (http://www.voxilla.org/projects/projape.html)
The description on this site is as follows:
"APE is a highly portable C++ framework for the development of threaded
servers and applications. The APE framework offers C++ fully portable class
encapsulation of threads, sockets, file access, syncrhonization objects, and
serial I/O. APE has been compiled under Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD and
offers a source tree for use in porting APE applications to the win32
environment."

The other possibility I saw would be to utilize the Mozilla project's
nspr-thread library.  I didn't look at this one closely (okay, I didn't look
at any of these closely), so I don't know much about this route.

Any thoughts?

- Sean T.