Multi-threading the interpreter

Markus Kohler markus_kohler at bbn.hp.com
Mon Nov 16 15:22:27 UTC 1998


Pat Caudill wrote:
> 
> 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. 

Couldn't that happen already today ?

If I have today a multithreaded application in squeak with more than one
thread using
the same collection of course I have to synchronize the access to that
collection. 

Another question is, if we have enough support for multithreaded
programming. 
IMHO what's at least missing is debugger support. 

> I suspect a
> significant part of the image code would have to be updated too.
> 
 
Some standard thread-save collections could be usefull ...



Markus

-- 
Markus Kohler  mailto:markus_kohler at hp.com





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