[armedbear-devel] Running abcl outside awt thread

[Erik Huelsmann]

Hi Jonathan,

On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 3:28 PM, Jonathan Fischer Friberg <
odyssomay at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> It seems that abcl is currently running on the awt thread. As when I get
> an error, it says something along the lines
>
> "#<THREAD "AWT-EventQueue-0" {3C6B5}>"
>

As Alessio said, ABCL runs in the caller's thread.


> This has some nasty side effects, namely:
>
> 1. eval blocks the ui (until the eval has finished)
> 2. On error, the version 1.1.0 locks down the ui completely. That is, the
> ui locks and doesn't come back.
>
>
That's probably because your System.in stream is bound to streams which are
listening for input. The thread then only returns after ABCL has read input
to know what action its user wants to take. Basically, you want to install
handlers which present UI widgets to select such actions.


> So it would be nice if I could run abcl on it's own separate thread. Is
> such a thing possible?
>

Absolutely, however ...


> I guess in worst case I'll have to start up a separate thread in the eval
> (that is, in common lisp), which I think would do what I want. I would
> prefer to have the whole of abcl in its' own thread though.
>

... sometimes you want to take special precautions: while running its
initialization, ABCL also initializes its dynamic environment. This
environment is bound to the executing thread. Every time you create a new
thread and start running Lisp code on it, you'll be given a "clean" dynamic
environment. If that's ok with you, you can run as many threads on ABCL as
you want. However, dynamic environments are always bound to a specific
thread. There's no way to make an environment "jump from thread to thread"
when you create new threads in Lisp code.

Hmm. I hope that didn't confuse things for you.

Bye,

Erik.
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