[plt-scheme] Re: Using LibFFI along with threads

On Jul 17, Hans Oesterholt-Dijkema wrote:
> Dear Eli,
> 
> Thanks for your elaborate reply. I must admit that you are right on
> a lot of points. There's one advantage of having the "non blocking"
> ffi call, and that is: one keeps access to the returned C results,
> without having to serialize the results over a pipe.

Yes, but that's not a big problem.  Instead of some

  (define foo (non-blocking-call ....)) ; returns a foo pointer
  (printf "foo->bar = ~s\n" (foo-bar foo))
  (printf "foo->blah = ~s\n" (foo-blah foo))

you can do this:

  (define foo (gensym))
  (send-subprocess `(define ,foo (blocking-call ...)))
  (printf "foo->bar = ~s\n" (send-subprocess `(foo-bar ,foo)))
  (printf "foo->blah = ~s\n" (send-subprocess `(foo-blah ,foo)))

(And a few macros can make it even more transparent...)

This is equivalent to the foreign machinery that pulls off values from
a C object.


> That said. The current mzscheme source distribution depends already
> on threads afaik (have a look in the gc subdir?).

But it does assume that Scheme execution is done on a single thread.
For example, using Scheme callbacks will probably break things if done
on a different thread.  But this is obviously a problem either way,
subprocess, fork, or whatever.  (And, for example, being able to
serialize closures would be a solution in all of cases.)

In any case, let me clarify: I do believe that async calls *are*
useful.  If you can verify that the c-threads code that you wrote
works fine on Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD, and Solaris then it would be a
good starting point to integrate that in.  (If you don't have access
to these platforms, then perhaps you can write enough test cases and I
can run them.)  Yes, callbacks from a thread would break things -- but
the reason for the `(unsafe!)'  statement is that you can break things
anyway, so it's probably fine to throw that on the programmer's
shoulders.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!