[Ecls-list] Poll about removal of a feature

[Tobias C. Rittweiler]

Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll
<juanjose.garciaripoll at googlemail.com> writes:

> ... 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.
>
> Anybody is against it? Why?
>
> Juanjo

SBCL provides :SYNCHRONIZED T for MAKE-HASH-TABLE. For some other
things, it has big outside locks (e.g. package operations.)

In my experience, it's very nice when you can just add a ":synchronized
t" to a constructor, and can use the data structure as is -- that is you
do not need to create a new data structure with new accessors functions,
etc.pp.

  -T.