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Re: Multithreading, again and again
From: |
joakim |
Subject: |
Re: Multithreading, again and again |
Date: |
Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:50:27 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.0.90 (gnu/linux) |
Dmitry Antipov <address@hidden> writes:
> Hello all,
>
> this is an attempt to refresh the most important ideas everyone has about
> threads support in Emacs. Thanks in advance to all who spent their time
> thinking on answers. If someone thinks that I miss something important,
> notices and references to previous discussions around this topic are highly
> appreciated.
>
> 0. What we have, and where we go.
> What's the status of git://gitorious.org/emacs-mt/emacs-mt.git and
> http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/emacs/concurrency? Whether there are
> plans for further development?
>
> 1. To thread or not to thread?
> Is there a consensus whether it's worth doing at all? If I don't miss
> something important from previous discussions (referenced from
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NoThreading, what a title), everyone
> agrees that some kind of threading is useful - but maybe someone has
> the votum separatum?
>
> 2. Hide them all!
> Should the threads be visible (may be created and managed) from Lisp,
> or they can just do some work orthogonal to it? If latter, which tasks may
> be implicitly threaded? Redisplay (one thread per frame)? Buffer/socket
> I/O? GC? Is it feasible to implement full implicit concurrency? For the
> rough example, with the Lisp engine as the pool of threads, where (eval
> FORM) just queues the FORM and then ask the pool to find a free thread
> and evaluate it?
>
> 3. Too big, too global.
> How to split/share/synchronize huge global state between threads?
> What should be thread-local? (I feel (current-buffer) should be
> global and max-lisp-eval-depth should be thread-local, but I suspect
> that there are much more controversial cases). Is it reasonable to
> have become-thread-local-on-write globals?
>
> 4. Say "thread"!
> What should be done in C to implement thread management in Lisp?
> I feel basically
>
> (let ((th (make-thread FUNCTION ARGS))) ...)
>
> should create thread object TH which represents running thread executing
> Lisp function FUNCTION with ARGS (like funcall, but within separate
> thread),
> and such thread object may be examined with stuff like (thread-running-p
> TH),
> canceled with (thread-cancel TH), asked for FUNCTION's return value with
> (thread-return TH), and so. But is this nothing more than adding some
> builtins? Will it require some more substantial language changes? What
> about old controversial topic on lexical vs. dynamic binding?
>
> 5. You and I.
> What synchronization primitives should be implemented? Atomic variables?
> Mutexes/semaphores? Barriers? Higher-level not-so-primitives like
> thread pools or multithreaded queues? Should some basic operations,
> like setq, be always atomic? Is it reasonable/feasible/useful to have
> special form like (with-atomic BODY...), where all BODY forms are evaluated
> atomically with respect to all other threads?
>
> 6. Under the cover.
> What other low-level changes are required for thread support?
> Basic structure of Lisp objects? Multiple stacks scanning for GC?
> Per-thread heaps for small objects?
>
> 7. Look around.
> Has someone an experience with development of multithreaded code for
> commercial Common Lisp implementations, most probably LispWorks and/or
> Allegro CL? If yes, can someone briefly explain pros and cons of their
> approach to multithreading?
>
> Dmitry
IMHO an interesting option is replacing the current Elisp implementation
with GNU Guile. The Guile-Emacs project is working on this. Guile
implements threads. That doesn't say anything about what the semantics
for threads should be in Elisp however. Guile-Emacs is IMHO the right
path for several reasons.
--
Joakim Verona