[mercury-users] Threads

[Fergus Henderson]

On 12-Feb-1999, Don Syme <dsyme at microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
> Are there any docs on this?  Will Mercury threads map down to Win32 threads
> on Windows systems (I presume so).

Our current implementation of Mercury threads uses POSIX threads.
It probably wouldn't be too hard to port it to work directly
with Windows threads, but I don't have much experience with Windows threads,
so I can't be sure of that.

However, our Windows port uses Cygwin, which currently doesn't support
threading -- POSIX threads aren't implemented and Windows threads aren't
safe to use since the C library isn't thread-safe.
However, the reports are that the next version of Cygwin will support
threading (and I imagine that it will include a POSIX threads binding).

Mission Critical have apparently ported Mercury to Windows using MSVC
rather than gcc/Wygwin.  That port could be extended to use Windows
threads.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "Binaries may die
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |   but source code lives forever"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- leaked Microsoft memo.