[Ecls-list] Poll about removal of a feature

[Matthew Mondor]

On Wed, 3 Feb 2010 22:50:38 +0100
Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll <juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> wrote:

> ... if it can be called so.
> 
> SBCL has opted to make all make all structures unprotected against
> concurrent access. That means hashtables, arrays, and other structures have
> to be managed by the user taking into account the fact that different
> threads may try to read / write to them. In other words, those structures do
> not have mutexes, locks, semaphores, etc.
> 
> I would like to copy that idea in ECL, cleaning up and simplifying the
> hashtables code.

So far in multithreaded code I did not assume those were already
protected and used mutexes already, so this would not affect my code.
Of course for this change to work, other ECL code must also not require
that automatic synchronization, though, and I have no idea about that,
you are more clued than me about it.

This change will probably also slightly enhance performance for
non-threaded applications, and multithreaded ones using loosely coupled
techniques to avoid costly synchronizations.

Also, since SBCL is a popular implementation, I assume that most third
party code using i.e. the Bordeaux threads abstraction, also already do
their own synchronization around shared objects?

Thanks,
-- 
Matt