On 2010-Oct-12, at 10:22, Damian Conway wrote:
> What we really need is some anecdotal evidence from folks who are actually
> using threading in real-world situations (in *any* languages). What has worked
> in practice? What has worked well? What was painful? What was error-prone?
> And for which kinds of tasks?
>
> And we also need to stand back a little further and ask: is "threading"
> the right approach at all? Do threads work in *any* language? Are there
> better metaphors?
'Channels are a good model of the external world' - Russ Cox
Threads without Locks, slide 39
Perhaps the work on the 'channel' model done in Plan9 (and Inferno) will be
helpful.
It has many years of experience in publicly available code, libraries, and
discussion
archives, and verification tools.
Particularly the work of Russ Cox
http://swtch.com/~rsc/
Particularly
Threads without Locks
Bell Labs, Second International Plan 9 Workshop, December 2007
http://swtch.com/~rsc/talks/threads07/
This talk has a nice crisp overview of the issues in different models
and mentions several real world applications
concurrent prime sieve (by Mcllroy)
file system indexer implementation
publish and subscribe
re-entrant IO multiplexing window systems
http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/cws.pdf <------ amazing
stuff!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=810232012617965344
the classic 'Squinting at Power Series' - and several others (see slide 31)
http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/squint.pdf
(this could be an excellent test suite of any 'threading' implementation)
and extended in the work of PlanB
http://lsub.org/ls/planb.html
http://lsub.org/index.html#demos
This model is available on many OSs in the port of Plan9 to user space
http://swtch.com/plan9port/
and in C based libthread that builds multiple-reader, multiple-writer finite
queues.
There is a lot to like and borrow from Plan9, including the 9P2000 protocol as
a core organizing meme
http://9p.cat-v.org/faq
The 'Spin' verification tool and it's history are *very* interesting also
http://swtch.com/spin/
Note that many of the people doing 'go' were the ones that did Plan9
Regards,
Todd Olson
PS I'd really like to have their channel model available in Perl6
Many things I'd like to model would work well with channels
I have (unpublished) Perlish syntax to lay over channels
PPS Russ has also done some nice work on regular expression engines
http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/
