[fpc-pascal] cthreads

[Sven Barth]

On 27.07.2014 17:01, Henry Vermaak wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 02:39:58PM +0200, Sven Barth wrote:
>> On 27.07.2014 11:39, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>>> Sven Barth wrote:
>>>> On 26.07.2014 19:50, leledumbo wrote:
>>>>>> Because then all apps are linked to it, also the ones that don't need
>>>>> threads. Same for clocale and cwstrings.
>>>>>
>>>>> If the widestring manager could be made by ourselves, is it possible for
>>>>> thread manager as well?
>>>>
>>>> Principiall yes, but the problem here would be external code that the
>>>> program links to. E.g. Wine did something like this some time ago
>>>> (before they switched to pthreads) and needed to simulate some
>>>> structures so that libc switches to multithreaded mode... So if we
>>>> have Pascal only code (like the compiler) this would work without big
>>>> problems (if someone implements it of course ;) ), but if you have 3rd
>>>> party code not written in FPC then problems might arise...
>>>
>>> On the other hand, if somebody's linking in "alien" code then he should
>>> make himself aware of aware of the prerequisites, particularly since the
>>> threads are more likely to be in the main program (i.e. stuff that he's
>>> written) than in the library he's pulling in.
>>
>> That's not true. E.g. the Qt libraries happily create threads for various
>> background stuffs.
>
> Ha, I had a library that started a thread and it took me ages to figure
> out why my pascal program was crashing on callbacks from external
> threads.  I had to start a dummy thread right at the start of the
> program, even though I included cthreads.  Not a good experience all in
> all.

Yes, the FPC RTL is normally running in singlethreaded mode and at least 
one FPC thread (besides the main one) needs to be started to switch it 
in multithreaded mode. I thought that we had some improvements there at 
least in 2.7.1, but I'd need to check that again.

Regards,
Sven