random-state.net

SBCL Threading News #
hacking, December 5th 2011

SBCL 1.0.54 is barely out of the door, but I'm actually going to mention something that went in the repository today, and will be in the next release:

(TL;DR: Threads on Darwin are looking pretty solid right now. Go give them a shake and let me know what falls out.)

commit 8340bf74c31b29e9552ef8f705b6e1298547c6ab
Author: Nikodemus Siivola 
Date:   Fri Nov 18 22:37:22 2011 +0200

  semaphores in the runtime
    
    Trivial refactorings:
    
    * Rename STATE_SUSPENDED STATE_STOPPED for elegance. (Spells with
      the same number of letters as STATE_RUNNING, things line up
      nicer.)
    
    * Re-express make_fixnum in terms of MAKE_FIXNUM so that we can
      use the latter to define STATE_* names in a manner acceptable to
      use in switch-statements.
    
    * Move Mach exception handling initialization to darwin_init from
      create_initial_thread so that current_mach_task gets initialized
      before the first thread struct is initialized.
    
    The Beef:
    
      Replace condition variables in the runtime with semaphores.
    
      On most platforms use sem_t, but on Darwin use semaphore_t. Hide
      the difference behind, os_sem_t, os_sem_init, os_sem_destroy,
      os_sem_post, and os_sem_wait.
    
      POSIX realtime semaphores are supposedly safe to use in signal
      handlers, unlike condition variables — and experimentally at
      least Mach semaphores on Darwin are a lot less prone to
      problems.
    
      (Our pthread mutex usage isn't quite kosher either, but it's the
      pthread_cond_wait and pthread_cond_broadcast pair that seemed to
      be causing most of the trouble.)

(There are some other neat things lurking in HEAD in addition to this, but I'll let you discover them for yourself.)