Eric,

I think you might be positively surprised about Squeak's threads. They are
very lightweight and process switching is extremely efficient - according to
my measures a process switch costs roughly as much as four message sends. In
fact, if you do heavy process switching you will find that Squeak's
dog-simple implementation beats commercial variants (such as VisualWorks) by
factors of ~20. All in all my experience with threads in Squeak was
extremely pleasant so I encourage you to give it a try.

Cheers,
  - Andreas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On 
> Behalf Of Eric Merritt
> Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 11:30 PM
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Squeak and Active Objects
> 
> 
> Hello All,
> 
>  How good is the threading system within squeak? I
> have quite a few little simulations written in Erlang
> and I thought I would try moving a few to squeak. This
> is for fun more then anything else. 
> 
>  I thought that the most interesting way to go about
> this would be to wrap objects up into their own
> threads, something like Mozart-Oz does with its active
> objects
> (http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/tutorial/node11.html#s
> ection.objectscc.active)
> 
>  <side-note> 
>    I realize their is nothing to be gained performance
> wise by the use of multiple threads. This is
> especially true in squeak as it uses VM threads.
> However, in this context I am using threads as another
> abstraction, nothing more.
>  </side-note>
> 
>  There will probably be a few problems, of course. I
> am not sure how 'light' squeak threads are. In Erlang
> processes cost almost nothing to spin off and the
> system is designed completely around concurrency. I
> don't expect Squeak to compete with Erlang or Mozart
> in this area, but it would need to support a goodly
> number of concurrent threads.
>  
>  I should probably just test this, but I though it
> would be nice to get the communities input
> 
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