Re: New module pthread

[Paul Eggert]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

>   If you think that using the POSIX API literally is important, how about
>   changing the gnulib threading modules to adopt the POSIX API (with
>   limitations where necessary)?

Yes, that would be nice.  We want the source code to look like POSIX.

Also, part of the idea, I expect, is to use only the system's
POSIX-compatible pthread support, or to use no threads at all, and not
to mess with non-POSIX-compatible threading, in order to simplify
porting hassles.  (This is how I interpreted Jim's remarks.)

We don't need to worry about OSF/1, either, as it's obsolete.

If the gnulib threading module made it easy for a package to run in
simplified pthread-or-nothing mode, that would be handy.  Perhaps I
could try to draft something along those lines?

One worry I have is that suppose part of a package wanted to use the
pthread module, and another part wanted to use the thread module; we'd
want that to work too, I expect.  This would suggest a rather thin
interface from pthread to thread, with a lot of stuff turned off if
nobody uses thread directly.  (I'm handwaving a bit here....)

> - pthread.m4 assumes that in order to use threads, it is only necessary to
>   add some library at link time. But this is not enough:
>     - On OSF/1 and Solaris, -D_REENTRANT needs to be added to CPPFLAGS.
>     - On AIX and FreeBSD, -D_THREAD_SAFE needs to be added to CPPFLAGS.
>   See m4/threadlib.m4 for details.

Thanks for mentioning that; it needs to be fixed one way or another.