[Ecls-list] POSIX synchronous signal handling in ECL

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

Hi,

following what I have learnt from Jean Claude's contributions, and
what I could read in a few documents out there, I have cooked up a
documentation of what will be the next signal handling model in ECL.

The text is here: http://ecls.sourceforge.net/new-manual/ch22.html

The implementation is being polished, but if mostly follows the text:
- If threads are available, a separate thread captures and dispatches
asynchronous signals.
- A few signals still have to be handled with the old model. This
includes floating point exceptions, access violations to protected
memory, and process interrupts (mp:interrupt-process).

Feel free to comment on this now. Signal handling in multithreaded
environments is a tricky thing and we may need a couple iterations to
get it right.

Also, as I said, the code is still being polished -- I do not want the
Windows port to be broken or left behind because of this change --,
and this is causing the next release to be delayed.

Juanjo

-- 
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com