Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 13:34:26 +0800 (GMT)
From: Orlando Andico <orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph>
To: Mark Habersack <grendel AT ananke DOT amu DOT edu DOT pl>
cc: snarfy AT goodnet DOT com, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: New threads package available!
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.95.961015133138.10709F-100000@ananke.amu.edu.pl>
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.93.961016133102.8252A-100000@gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Tue, 15 Oct 1996, Mark Habersack wrote:

> On 14 Oct 1996 snarfy AT goodnet DOT com wrote:
> 
> >The lwp package is a very simple time sliced multitasking library.  It 
> >allows you to execute functions 'in the backround' without having to 
> >worry about multitasking.  The package supports two of the PC's timers
> >so that it will still work with other librarys that also use the timer.
> 
> Josh, will the library be able to handle several TASKS (i.e. real
> applications) in the future. Do you intend to extend it to work as a simple
> kernel for asynchronous execution of tasks?

That's an unjust dig!  ;)

I've been tinkering with some POSIX threads implementations under Linux,
and with the exception of Xavier Leroy's Linuxthreads package (which is a
_kernel_ level threading library), none of them is really good at
timeslicing several I/O-blocking tasks simultaneously.

IOW, these POSIX threads packages can do multiple threads in a single
process, but when you do some blocking I/O (network stuff), the response
goes to hell. I don't know, but by default the libc network socket
routines are blocking so this behavior is more or less inevitable.

So we can't demand more from our DOS apps (even under DJGPP) when the
current level of Linux threads packages aren't that much up to spec
anyway..