From: rcoder <rcoder@...>
Date: 2005-08-10T05:41:10+09:00
Subject: Re: event driven framework for ruby

Actually, the entire point of "native" threading is to allow blocking
actions to be performed in one thread while another runs -- hence their
usual applications in user interfaces which must stay responsive while
some blocking operation is happening, or in network servers where each
client is assigned a thread, so that socket reads and writes don't stop
the entire process.

It's true that Linux and *BSD did not always have the best support for
native threading, but at this point all the major distributions and
variants seem to have pretty much figured it out. However, since the
threading model was inconsistent from system to system, many developers
simply used the MIT pthreads implementation, which was a purely
user-space implementation, with the same limitations as Ruby's internal
threading model.

-Lennon