[fpc-pascal] getting started with threads

[David Emerson]

I am getting started with threads (linux/cthreads) and I'm very happy so 
far, but unsure of the best way to tackle my situation.

I have a program that needs to perform about 10,000 independent tasks, 
which usually involve waiting for I/O; thus it makes sense to use 
several threads so that some waiting can be done in parallel. I thought 
I'd try it with 10 threads.

When a thread completes its task, I'd like it to simply request a new 
task from the queue. The best way I could think to do this was to have 
a task assignment function (which accesses a global variable and 
returns a task id, marking it as pending.)

But how can I prevent race conditions? If threads X and Y happen to call 
the task assignment function at the same time, it seems to me that they 
could both be assigned to the same task. I know that this is a problem 
which has been addressed at great length in the computer science 
world ... so what's the easiest way for me to address it here and now?


While writing this message it dawned on me that I probably need an event 
loop (I'm writing a console app) which will, e.g., sleep for 1 second 
and then check on the status of each thread's work. Then the main loop 
can assign a new task by starting a new thread, whenever it finds one 
that is finished. That puts the assignment task back in the main loop 
where there is no race condition.

Do I even need to send this message? It would be nice to get a little 
input and see if I'm on the right track :)

Cheers,
David