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

[Thomas Charron]

Quoting "N. Sean Timm" <stimm at rmci.net>:
> 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?

  Send the diffs to Jer and temas.  They know the library best, and I'd say are 
best able to incorperate them into the core source tree..

> 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).

  I haven't seen to many that actually have USER threads, instead of system 
threads.  This is exactly one of the reasons why pth was used.  We can have 
2000 threads running, without the overhead of 2000 system threads..

> 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).

  Again, it's not really the threading capability, it's the method..

> 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."

  Yes, I've looked at it..  Simular to pth, but as far as I could see, does not 
overcome the basic hurdle of handling threads in user space, and not in system 
space..

--- 
Thomas Charron
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