Re: Patch for fields of `struct buffer'

[Lennart Borgman]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 5:19 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Well, that's actually what I was asking Daniel.  I'm not sure how
> illiterate you think you are, so please try not to be insulted if it's
> all too basic.

Oh, it has been a pleasure reading your answer.


> The problem with threads as I see it, and I believe this is why
> Richard and Guido express pessimism too, is that Lisp objects tend to
> get all linked together.  Tasks that follow the links and mutate the
> objects are likely to interfere with each other, but that is a very
> common pattern in dynamic languages.  In Python, this is handled with
> the GIL, or global interpreter lock.[1]  In many circumstances, a thread
> must grab that lock, excluding all other threads from running.  This
> also is somewhat expensive in terms of CPU AIUI.  Many proposals have
> been made to remove the GIL from Python, but (so far) they all fall
> down because it turns out that keeping track of lots of "local" locks
> is either very expensive, or deadlock-prone.  (The "STM" that I
> mentioned in connection with Haskell and Simon Peyton-Jones is more or
> less a technique for automatically managing "local" locks, and has
> been applied successfully in some projects.)

Thanks, I see. Isn't that problem there also with Tom's proposal of a
per thread-pointer for global vars?