[Vm-dev] bulid.squeak.org puzzlement

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Thu Dec 10 15:15:04 UTC 2015


Hi Tim,

    but OSProcess is /not/ deterministic, because of the lack of non-blocking i/o calls.  To read from the pipes that provide the output of commands, OSProcess has to use loops that poll for output after a delay.  This is an awful hack and a source of non-determinism.  It's increasingly urgent that we have a threaded FFI and discard hacks like this, especially in key infrastructure like spawning external commands.  Fortunately thus work will likely get funded next year and my prototype should be productized some time in 2016.

_,,,^..^,,,_ (phone)

> On Dec 9, 2015, at 8:37 PM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Thanks for that summary Dave.  Ain’t it scary how a supposedly deterministic machine can seem so random?
> 
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn.
> 
> 


More information about the Vm-dev mailing list