[m-rev.] for review: shift spawn/3 etc, into the standard library

[Peter Ross]

On 1/15/07, Julien Fischer <juliensf at csse.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Peter Ross wrote:
>
> > On 1/15/07, Julien Fischer <juliensf at csse.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> >> Shift extras/concurrency/spawn.m into a new standard library module
> >> named `thread'.
> >>
> > Is it really useful to have the spawn primitive in the std library but
> > no primitives for communicating between threads?
>
> You can use mutables to communicate between threads at the moment since in
> .par grades the access predicates have the necessary synchronization
> mechanisms.  (We don't have atomic updates for mutables yet, although we
> have a design for them - the problem is the "nice" implementation requires
> polymorphic insts and there is a bug with closures and polymorphic insts at
> the moment.)
>
> > For me the whole concurrency library should be moved in.
>
> The modules that look useful there are mvar, semaphore and channel.  I
> can't see any reason not to move them into the standard library, e.g.
>
>         thread.mvar
>         thread.sempahore
>         thread.channel
>
> The other modules left in the concurrency library seem less useful,
> some like, global, just duplicate functionality that's already available
> in the standard library.
>
mvar and channel are the two I use the most.

I find them an easier abstraction to reason about than semaphores.
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