[armedbear-devel] Thread safety of the compiler (was: Thread safety of clos.lisp)

[Erik Huelsmann]

> The NullPointerExceptions were caused by the fact that COMPILE was
> running in 2 threads at the same time, generating the same symbol at
> the same time. Then, it called REMEMBER from both threads, one
> overwriting the value stored by the other. That doesn't cause
> NullPointerExceptions by itself, but when each thread loads its
> COMPILEd function, the constructor calls Lisp.recall(), which removes
> the key from the hash used for temp-storage. The second function then
> finds 'null' instead of the value it stored.
>
> So, that's another mystery solved. Fixed in trunk now.
>
> However, what remains is the fact that the remember/recall combo uses
> global keys while COMPILE may be generating thread-local key values.
> I'm wondering what to do about that. Possibly I should just create a
> ThreadLocal which has a temp-storage hash table per thread and
> document remember/recall are a thread-local storage mechanism.

I slept on this and think that I'll move the remember/recall
functionality to the LispThread object, which is by itself
thread-local. However, this allows cross-thread retrieval if necessary
after all.

The proposed change is to have a Hashmap object in the LispThread
object which is initialized upon instantiation. Access to this object
will be synchronized, however, if I understand the synchronization can
be eliminated by the JIT compiler after it determines there's no
contention on the resource (the usual case).

How about that?

Bye,

Erik.