From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id IAA20817 for caml-redistribution; Mon, 22 Sep 1997 08:58:08 +0200 (MET DST)
Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id QAA21592 for <caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr>; Thu, 18 Sep 1997 16:18:29 +0200 (MET DST)
Received: from pauillac.inria.fr (pauillac.inria.fr [128.93.11.35])
	by concorde.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA20705;
	Thu, 18 Sep 1997 16:18:27 +0200 (MET DST)
Received: (from xleroy@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id QAA21587; Thu, 18 Sep 1997 16:18:26 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>
Message-Id: <199709181418.QAA21587@pauillac.inria.fr>
Subject: Re: camlex/camlyacc + threads problem
In-Reply-To: <199709100817.KAA05734@yeti.didac-mip.fr> from Olivier Bouyssou at "Sep 10, 97 10:17:24 am"
To: bouyssou@didac-mip.fr
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 16:18:26 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: caml-list@inria.fr
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: weis

> I've a problem when I use a parser in multiple threads. If the calls to the 
> parser are not enclosed by a mutex, there are parse errors. ( See example in 
> french version )

Of course.  Most of the O'Caml standard library is *not* thread-safe
yet.  So far, everything in Pervasives is thread-safe, in particular
I/O, but other stateful libraries are not.  This includes in
particular Hashtbl, Queue, and Lexing.

There are no easy ways to make a library thread-safe and still have it
working in the non-threaded case.  So, I'm not promising these
problems will be fixed soon.

In the meantime, use mutexes liberally, or make sure that only one
thread is doing e.g. parsing.

- Xavier Leroy