Hello, Recently I exchanged information about user threads with Ruby community in Japan.
The user threads of Ruby 1.8 are heavy weight and Ruby 1.9 switched to kernel threads. The reason why user threads of Ruby 1.8 are heavy weight is *portability*. Since Ruby community does not want to prepare assembler to change stack pointers for each supported CPU architecture, Ruby 1.8 copies the stack of user threads on context switch. Because I need to explain why the user threads of GHC are light weight, I gave a look at GHC's source code and found the loadThreadState function in compiler/codeGen/StgCmmForeign.hs. In this function, the stack pointer is changed in the Cmm level. So, my interpretation is as follows: Since GHC has Cmm backend, it is easy to provide assembler to change stack pointers for each supported CPU architecture. That's why GHC can provide light weight user threads. Is my understanding correct? Thanks in advance. --Kazu _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
