[fpc-pascal] Re: Multi-threaded project with few locks (no Thread.waitfor). Memory consumption keeps increasing on Ubuntu 10.10 x64

[Andrew Brunner]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 7:04 AM, Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe at elis.ugent.be> wrote:

> He cannot. If freeonterminate=true, then even if you call "inherited
> create(false)" as the very last statement of your constructor, the thread
> may already have finished running and freed itself before AfterConstruction
> is called. The AfterConstruction call will then crash.


Right.  I think that it would have been totally acceptable due to the
nature of threads especially on differing os(es) to not have
AfterConstruction because of this very issue.

The fact that threads can zip through their execute event and self
terminate before the AfterConstruction is even called is definitely an
issue that can only be solved with synchronization of some sort.
Threads are a special case where these objects themselves represent a
kernel process with its own distinct timeline.  Logically, performance
cannot be a priority when requiring synchronization of differing
timelines.

But for small projects where Delphi offers TThread with these
features, it is good for FPC to accommodate Delphi source.  There is
always going to be a demographic  who will never need performance and
performance is not much of an issue for projects with < 1000 threads
to the observer.

IMO, it would be better to leverage the present performance condition
to muster support for a high performance thread component set.