Threads anyone?

[Donovan Kolbly]

On Fri, 28 Aug 1998, Rodrigo Ventura wrote:

> 
>         Hi. This question is half-off-topic, but here it goes:
> 
>         I tried to use threads in rscheme but it looked like only a
> small subset of the documented functions were implemented. Then I
> found out an "hidden" huge-named module which also implemented threads
> that looked like the documented functions. Anyway it seemed still
> unusable and I gave up. 

Was the "hidden" module rs.sys.threads.manager?  If so, that is the
new-with-unreleased-0.7.3 threads package and I'm curious to know what you
found unusable about it.  It is based on thread support that other people
are using regularly, and it is supposed to be usable and useful.

Any problems you had with the new threads package I will take as a bug and
try to fix.

The base threads support (ie, the threads module in the base system) is
also useful, but requires more kick-starting to get it into gear, and will
be deprecated in favor of the newer modules.

> The whole idea was to port a agent-oriented
> language I developed in Common Lisp to scheme, and rscheme looked like
> a great platform.

Sounds interesting; I've used RScheme for such a project before, to fair
success.  The new threads package is based on my experiences with that
project, in fact.

> 
>         Several months after I'm interested in resuming that project,
> and perhaps redesign a new agent-oriented language from scratch, and I
> want to start doing some experimentation. The idea is to use threading
> intensively, looking at sequencing as an optimization. Anyway, what I
> want is a strong thread support in a scheme language platform.
> 
>         Here are my options so far:
>                 rscheme -- unusable thread support, at least now
>                 scm -- no threads at all, AFAIK
>                 mit-scheme -- no threads, too complex system
>                 scheme48 -- some thread support
> 
>         Is there anymore scheme implementations with better/working
> thread support? Is any working Common Lisp environment working with
> threads? Is my evaluation of the above scheme implementations
> wrong/incomplete? What are your suggestions?
> 
>         Regards,
> 
> --
> 
> *** Rodrigo Martins de Matos Ventura, alias <Yoda>
> ***  yoda@isr.ist.utl.pt, http://www.isr.ist.utl.pt/~yoda
> ***   Instituto de Sistemas e Robotica, Polo de Lisboa
> ***    Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa, Portugal
> ***     PGP Public Key available on my homepage
> *** Key fingerprint = 0C 0A 25 58 46 CF 14 99  CF 9C AF 9E 10 02 BB 2A
> 

-- Donovan Kolbly                    (  RScheme Development Group
                                     (  d.kolbly@rscheme.org
				     (  http://www.rscheme.org/~donovan/