Multi-threading the interpreter

Pat Caudill patc at teleport.com
Mon Nov 16 15:16:02 UTC 1998


Jan Bottorff wrote
>At 03:18 PM 11/14/98 -0500, dick Peskin wrote:
>>A multi-threaded interpreter would be a good idea anyway. For example, if
>>there were a way to make the interprter multi-threaded, performance would
>>really be enhanced under the BeOS on multi-processor systems, since it is a
>>pervasively multi-threaded OS which will map threads to available
>>processors. Has any work been done on multi-threaded interpreters? I can
>>see all sorts of issues such as how to handle garbage collection.
>
>There are many very sticky issues of doing a multi-threaded,
>multi-processor Smalltalk.

It's not just in the VM. Look at what might happen if two processes tried 
to add an element to an OrderedCollection at the same time. I suspect a 
significant part of the image code would have to be updated too.

Pat Caudill
patc at acm.org
Pat_Caudill at Instantiations.com





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