Squeak is doing a *lot* of gettimeofday()

Noel J. Bergman noel at devtech.com
Tue Feb 12 21:20:50 UTC 2002


> But what about using PTHREAD support instead! Seems a simple choice
? for many platforms that have PTHREAD ...

Funny you should raise this ... I was just asking Andreas, off-list, about
the lack of true threading in the Squeak VM.

He felt that:

      1 threads are just not available on all platforms
	  and their semantics differ wildly (look at Java's
        differences regarding threads across different platforms).

      2 multi-threading does not give any advantage in speed unless
        you're running on a multi-processor scheme.

And apparently, the current VM is not designed to be thread friendly.
Unlike, for example, some implementation where the Interpreter is a real
object instantiated for each Process.

Therefore without some compelling reason, such as performance and override
the value of portability allowed by Squeak managing it's own "green
threads", what is the point of restricting the execution model to the native
thread implementation?

On the flip side, I'll note that threading reduces polling and better
supports blocking I/O.

	--- Noel




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