[plt-scheme] Waiting for multiple events

On Jul 29, Gregory Woodhouse wrote:
> have a set of events I want to occur before my main thread proceeds,  
> but I don't care about the order. (Actually, it doesn't matter that  
> much if I wait for them in a given order, but in this case, I don't  
> need that.)
> 
> The idea is that I use for/list to create a set of client threads in  
> my test suite, like so
> 
> (let ([clients
>             (for/list ((i (in-range 1 5)))
>               (thread
>                (lambda ()
>                  (let-values ([(in out) (tcp-connect "localhost" port- 
> no)])
> ...
> 
> The list clients contains the client threads I've just spawned. Now,  
> what I do to wait for them seems a little crazy, but it seems to work
> 
> 
> ...
>     (map sync clients))
>      (printf "Stopping server\n")
>        (stop)))
> 
> Mapping sync to a list of events seems strange, but it seems to work.  
> Intuitively, I suspect that the compiler will carry out (sync  
> thd-1 ..., (sync thd-2 ..., etc. in "parallel".

`map' should work fine, but you don't need to collect the results.
You can do some cute things similarly, like a parallel `begin':

  (define-syntax-rule (pbegin expr ...)
    (for-each thread-wait (list (thread (lambda () expr)) ...)))

BTW, a cute PLT-specific exercise is to implement a `pmap' which is a
parallel version of `map'.  (PLT-specific because the real hunt is for
the features that make it easy.)

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