Thanks!

"Ask and ye shall receive..."

Philip Metz


At 08:34 PM 11/26/2002 -0800, you wrote:
>On Tuesday 26 November 2002 08:16 pm, Philip Metz wrote:
>> Has there been any discussion of a multithreaded Squeak, i.e.
>> where messages can be sent and received asynchronously?
>> It seems to me that some applications could benefit from such
>> a capability, e.g. a user interface that needs to maintain near
>> real-time response, while the applications does intense processing
>> in the background.
>
>Squeak *is* multithreaded. It doesn't use operating system threads, 
>preferring to supply its own (this is much more portable and lighter 
>weight).
>
>> Is this incompatible with the basic design of Smalltalk, or just
>> very difficult to implement? Would it destroy some desirable
>> properties of Squeak's architecture?
>
>Neither. It's easy.
>
>[ something doSomethingVeryTimeConsuming ] forkAt: Processor 
>userBackgroundPriority.
>
>Look at: Semaphore, SharedQueue and SharedStreams (on SqueakMap). 
>Process, and the #fork and #forkAt: methods.
>
>Also open up a ProcessBrowser (World menu/debug/open Process Browser) 
>to look at and control the various processes.
>
>-- 
>Ned Konz
>http://bike-nomad.com
>GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE
>
>
>