From: claird@... (Cameron Laird)
Date: 2001-02-13T12:40:05+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:10766] Re: Threading model change, proposal

In article <969tsv$1jkk$1@news4.isdnet.net>,
Gaston Fong <gastonfong@yahoo.com> wrote:
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>So, to sum things up,
>1 - one GUI thread is enough and more is definitely bad.
More than bad, it's unknown.  X itself isn't
thread-safe, according to persistent rumors.
It's just not done.  'Twould be interesting
to have a compelling reason to change this,
of course ...
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>3 - threads are really useful for :
>    * coding style (a very personal matter !!)
>    * keeping the system responsive under external API calls.
These *are* the two.

I don't mean to devalue the former reason, by
the way.  Programming with threads is a fine
and wonderful thing, apart from any perfor-
mance considerations, if it's a model that
helps a developer express solutions.

In regard to the second, note that it's for
a rather subtle sense of "external".  It means
something like, "external to the language",
with occasional exceptions that might be de-
pendent on implementation.  People know pretty
quickly when they have this need.
>
>What triggered this discussion is the fact that some calls in the Ruby lib
>actually block according to Dave Thomas excellent book.
>All the contributions seem to point in the same direction : providing a
>simple worker thread wrapper around some of the extension modules should be
>more than enough.
Yes, it matches my experience that a simple
thread wrapping of this sort brings a lot of
quick happiness.
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-- 

Cameron Laird <claird@NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html