Re: Example of threads and concurrency?

[Noam Postavsky]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2017 at 1:43 PM, Eric Abrahamsen
<address@hidden> wrote:
>> I update the variable with a time-consuming/network-bound
>> computation. I want the computation to happen in a thread so it
>> doesn't block,

You're out of luck, only one thread runs at a time.

>> Is everything in the right place? It just occurs to me that If I put
>> `thread-join' at the bottom of `update-data-in-thread' then it will
>> effectively be synchronous after all! So I put that somewhere else, or I
>> don't call it at all.

Yes (although as I said above, there is no parallelism regardless).

>>
>> Other questions:
>>
>> 1. Other code just has to know that it can't touch
>>    `important-data-variable' without holding `important-data-mutex',
>>    right?

Yes.

>> 2. I want the timer to signal the thread to give up after ten seconds --
>>    do I need to put anything in `update-important-data' that handles
>>    that signal?

The thread needs to call something that would yield, otherwise the
cancelling signal call will never have a chance to be sent.  The thread
doesn't need to handle the signal (assuming you're fine with just
quitting the thread).

>> 3. What do condition vars actually do? The manual has an example that
>>    looks just like what I'm doing above:
>>
>>    (with-mutex mutex
>>      (setq global-variable (some-computation))
>>      (condition-notify cond-var))
>>
>>    What is cond-var doing here?

To unblock the other thread that is waiting for it (2 paragraphs up):

    (with-mutex mutex
      (while (not global-variable)
        (condition-wait cond-var)))

>> It seems like both mutexes and cond-vars are there so other code knows
>> when to keep its hands off `important-data-variable', but I don't
>> understand how they're actually used.

They are used to synchronize between threads.  But if your thread is
just doing a single computation and then ends, make-thread and
thread-join can be an alternative to them.