I have some good news to share on the multi-threaded
Tcl Blend front. Last Friday, Ajuba agreed to fund
a development contract to fully implement multiple
thread support in Tcl Blend. I will be heading up the
development effort, with lots of help from Jiang Wu
the author of the "mythical Tcl Blend patch".
This means that soon it will be possible to use
Tcl Blend in multiple Tcl interpreters running in
different threads. It has always been possible to
add an event to a Tcl Blend interpreter's event queue
from another Java thread, but you could not run
Tcl Blend in two different interpreters that
lived in two different threads without getting
random crashes and deadlocks.
Here is the list of deliverables:
Fix deadlock in GC thread during decrRefCount.
Remove all JAVA_LOCK and JAVA_UNLOCK monitor calls.
Fix loading of Tcl + Tcl Blend into a JVM.
Stub enable Tcl Blend and implement stub loading of Tcl.
Ensure that Tcl Blend works on Windows 2000.
Create regression tests for multi-threaded Tcl Blend.
Add documentation related to use of Tcl Blend with threads.
Use single TEA compliant build system for both Unix and Windows.
Adding Thread support is going to require a major rewrite
of many parts of Tcl Blend and it will most likely take
about a month to get things stable. We don't want to
break the 1.3 version in the CVS for a month, so we are
going to do all of the development for this contract on
a branch and merge the changes back into the main 1.3
tree when it is all working. You are certainly welcome
to try out the version on the branch, but be warned
that it may be broken at any time.
The branch name is:
ajuba-tclblend-contract-2000-08-01-branch
We have already made some progress on the branch. Jiang
Wu has patched win/makefile.vc to get Tcl Blend building
on windows. I have removed all the JAVA_LOCK calls and
implemented the JNIEnv as thread local storage. Further
developments will be posted to the tcljava mailing list
as they happen.
cheers
Mo DeJong
Red Hat Inc
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