Re: Weightless Threads?

Daniel Berger wrote:
> Also known as "microthreads".
> 
> I remembered this article from a while back:
> 
> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-pythrd.html
> 
> Thoughts? Are there libraries out there for this?

I've done experiments with microthreading in JRuby, as part of exploring 
the possibility of implementing continuations. Long story short, heavily 
microthreaded code was about twice as slow as normal execution, due to 
the trampolining back and forth out of the method. But it's certainly 
feasible.

Second Life's Linden Scripting Language uses microthreading to allow 
migrating running scripts across areas in SL, which are each run by a 
separate machine. At any time, execution state can be memoized and 
passed to another machine.

There's also a library for the JVM that can take existing code and 
microthread it, providing continuations and stackless execution.

- Charlie