Re: [Chicken-users] Segfault - a hard one

[John Cowan]

Vincent Manis scripsit:

> I'd prefer to have the manual document that to the best of our knowledge
> thread-terminate works `correctly', but that its use is fraught with
> design and testing problems, and therefore it should be avoided.

I'd go even further:  KILL THE BEAST.

We've removed stuff a lot less problematic than this.  Having a program
rely on thread-terminate! is like having it rely on details of thread
scheduling: testing is insanely difficult and proof of soundness is
impossible.  Just remove it from the language before anyone starts
producing software that breaks with every random shift of the cosmos.

The Java people have deprecated (effectively killed, since they never
remove anything) their equivalents of thread-terminate!, thread-suspend!,
and thread-resume! because they all make deadlocks nearly inevitable,
sometimes disastrous ones.  There's an excellent writeup at
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/concurrency/threadPrimitiveDeprecation.html
 .

-- 
John Cowan  <address@hidden>  http://ccil.org/~cowan
Micropayment advocates mistakenly believe that efficient allocation of
resources is the purpose of markets.  Efficiency is a byproduct of market
systems, not their goal.  The reasons markets work are not because users
have embraced efficiency but because markets are the best place to allow
users to maximize their preferences, and very often their preferences are
not for conservation of cheap resources.  --Clay Shirkey