[coyotos-dev] Thoughts on FCRBs and asynchrony

[Christopher Nelson]

> On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 15:20 -0700, Christopher Nelson wrote:
> 
> > My first question is, how do activations (or continuations) 
> simplify a 
> > program versus threads, when you consider that an activation (or
> > continuation) is basically just a special thread?  In other 
> words, if 
> > you do anything that could interfere with the operation of the 
> > previously interrupted line of execution, you still have to worry 
> > about synchronization.
> 
> In some uses they do not simplify. It depends on your 
> programming idiom.
> 
> One idiom where things DO simplify is the event-driven 
> program. I can have lots of outstanding FCRBs. When the 
> corresponding events arrive, I will enqueue them for later processing.
> 
> In this idiom, you will discover that there are exactly two user-mode
> threads: the main worker thread and the thread that performs 
> the enqueueing of events. The enqueueing thread won't require 
> floating point state, etc.

I see. Thank you for helping me understand this.

-={C}=-