Re: [Chicken-hackers] Minutes of 2012-06-14 IRC meeting

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

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On 06/19/2012 10:00 AM, Felix wrote:
>> Indeed they should.  In the JVM, finalizers originally ran in ordinary
>> random threads, but there were so many problems that the design was
>> switched to running on a separate thread.  The CLR does the same.  See
>> http://www.cs.arizona.edu/projects/sumatra/hallofshame/monitor-finalizer.html
>> (which predates the switch) for details.
>
> The problem is that I would like to keep the base system thread-less
> (with the exception of the primordial thread, naturally). We don't
> need the scheduler until we use srfi-18. One option would be to run
> finalizers in a separate thread once we enable threading and just run
> them in the primordial thread if threading is not enabled yet.

That is a workable approach; but, also, what do we mean by "thread",
exactly?

I think we certainly need to run the finalizers in their own *dynamic
context*, eg with a special continuation that never leads back into
"user code" on its own.

And the difference between that and a *thread* is really down to what
happens if things block. Eg, if a finalizer sleeps for a second, what
should happen to the main line of execution?

ABS

- --
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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