Threads

[Dar Scott]

On Oct 5, 2006, at 12:46 PM, Andrew wrote:
>> What kind of communication?
>>   "Do this and let me know when you are finished."
>>   "Do this, show progress, and let me know when you are finished."
>>   Bidirectional message queue.
>>   Send messages to a thread in 'send' style.
>
> My initial idea would be that when you send a message you could do  
> so indicating it should be run it it's own thread (or in an  
> existing thread that you know the name of). By default each object  
> (button, field, card etc) would have a mutex that you must hold to  
> update it's attributes or to run any of its handlers (this would be  
> acquired automatically). It would be possible to do finer grained  
> locking if the programmer took the trouble to code it. The  
> automatic acquisition of locks would be dependent on some global  
> property (that might also be used to permit the creation of threads  
> in the first place) so there would be no overhead for non-threaded  
> stacks.

I think something like that might work, however I wonder what the  
right way would be to make this fit into the Revolution way of things  
and to ward off potential problems.

It might start off simple, perhaps between sort of between a thread  
and a process in which a library script is used to create a thread  
and messages (like with send) are sent back and forth.  The shared  
resources might be added based on that.  Same with accessing objects.

That is far from being able to access anything the home thread could,  
so folks might think that too weak.

Dar

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Dar Scott
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