[slime-devel] Re: Partial multiprocessing support on CMUCL

[Daniel Barlow]

Luke Gorrie <luke at bluetail.com> writes:

> But before more hacking, I'd appreciate some words of advice on what
> thread primitives we can reasonably assume the Lisps will support. Any
> takers?

Most Lisps will, one way or another, support the stuff in CLIM-SYS.
You should note, however, that some of them support some of it badly -
specifically, when your Lisp threads are scheduled by the OS kernel
it's difficult to implement PROCESS-WAIT (and other functions that
wait for an arbitrary predicate) except by doing something rather akin
to busy-waiting.

Mutexes should be pretty safe.  Alternatively, specify a higher-level
interface (a message queue, or something) and let each backend
implement it in whatever fashion makes sense.  SBCL has condition
variables, OpenMCL has counting semaphores (I think), etc etc.


-dan

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