Re: [gnugo-devel] GNU Go as an oracle

[Andrew Derrick Balsa]

Hi,

On Thursday 07 November 2002 10:26, Dave Denholm wrote:
[...]
> pthreads is the posix threads package. There are various implementations
> for linux and win32, so that would probably be the most portable approach.
> And of course solaris, hpux, aix etc offer pthreads. Don't know about
> macos.
>
> At least one of the implementations of pthreads on linux uses clone(),
> but it isn't strictly conforming to the posix standard. It is usually good
> enough for most applications, though. There are other pthreads libraries
> around which are entirely user mode.

Here is a list of multithreading libraries:
http://www.gnu.org/software/pth/related.html
>
>
> However, FWIW, my own experience is that introducing threads always makes
> things over-complicated. It is very difficult to get threaded programs
> correct.

It's not trivial, but this team has a bunch of excellent programmers that 
certainly can handle it.
>
> Eg if we start a thread to look ahead, we have to be able to terminate
> it. Which means we need some sort of handshake to make the main thread
> know when the helper has terminated etc.

POSIX pthreads provides a rich set of standard calls for synchronization. 
>
> On unix, this is a lot easier to manage with a child process. Unfortunately
> that's not portable, of course.

Hmmm, I am not sure it's easier with child processes. My suggestion would be 
to try with pthreads first. Having a single address space is the big 
advantage, it saves a lot of work.

Regards,
-- 
Andrew D. Balsa
address@hidden