Hi, What should be the default threading API used by the module 'threadlib' (and thus also 'lock', 'rwlock', 'cond', etc.) on mingw. There are two choices:
--enable-threads=windows does not need non-Microsoft DLLs. --enable-threads=posix links against winpthreads.dll. (Whereas Ross Johnson's pthreads-win32 [1] is apparently no longer maintained for 7 years, therefore no viable option.) Arguments I can see in favour of --enable-threads=windows: * The gnulib threads code (lib/glthread/) for Windows is much smaller than the one in mingw's winpthreads, thus contains likely fewer bugs. * The gnulib threads code is portable across architectures; no assembly-language code. * It makes me nervous to see that, 5 years after winpthreads was declared no longer experimental (in 2013), we still see fixes of race conditions and dirty hacks: 2019-04-26 winpthreads/cond.c: Remove waits for `sema_b` from wait functions. 2019-04-26 winpthreads/cond.c: Only update `waiters_count_` with `waiters_count_lock_` locked. 2017-03-10 winpthreads/src/thread.c: Force aligning ESP on 16-byte boundaries on x86. 2016-11-24 winpthreads mem leak fixed * One less DLL dependency. Arguments I can see in favour of --enable-threads=posix: * The mingw platform is moving away from a "minimal" layer on top of Windows towards an ISO C + POSIX layer. There is no point in working against this evolution. Opinions? Bruno [1] https://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/