OpenEuphoria

Re: Threads?

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Oct 09, 2002
• 432 views

Jonas Temple writes:
> I know this has been discussed in the past 
> but is there any plans in the near future for 
> thread in Euphoria?

Not in the near future.
There are a lot of thorny issues regarding threads,
and only a small percentage of people would likely use them.
It would be an interesting thing to do at some time.

One thorny problem is the issue of "thread-safe" library routines.
Many C library routines, as well as some Euphoria run-time
routines are not necessarily "thread-safe". For example, if one
thread was executing in the middle of malloc(), and then 
control passed suddenly to another thread which then 
called malloc(), you could corrupt the heap. I think the 
Microsoft compiler has a version of the C run-time 
that is thread-safe, and another (faster one) that isn't.

> I've recently had occasions where I could use threads in Euphoria, 
> particularly for functions that could run a long time (database 
> retrieval).

You can today, run multiple Euphoria *processes*, 
i.e. separate programs, which can communicate 
via files or shared memory. This gives you parallelism, 
but at a coarser level than threads, i.e. the context
switching is slower.

Regards,
   Rob Craig
   Rapid Deployment Software
   http://www.RapidEuphoria.com