Re: [Caml-list] gc question: thread stacks, fibers, etc.

[John Max Skaller <skaller@ozemail.com.au>]

Chris Hecker wrote:

> 
> Fibers/Coroutines/Cooperative-Threads

> In C, you implement them by mallocing a stack and with a little snippet 
> of asm, or mucking with the jmpbuf fields.  They're pretty trivial to 
> get working fairly robustly


.. and fairly useless in most demanding applications due to the
impossibility of dynamically extending/shrinking the stack.
If that isn't a problem .. you might as well just use
real threads ..

Felix solves this problem by using heap allocated stack
frames .. there is a cost in that many procedure calls
must be done indirectly via a driver routine which
maintains the top of stack pointer for each thread.
It also preserves high efficiency by disallowing
blocking I/O (yields) in functional code, which use
the machine stack as usual.

BTW: I consider the technique a case of continuations,
but it is probably more correct to consider it
as a system of resumptions.



-- 
John Max Skaller, mailto:skaller@ozemail.com.au
snail:10/1 Toxteth Rd, Glebe, NSW 2037, Australia.
voice:61-2-9660-0850


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