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From: pae@athena.mit.edu (Philip Earnhardt)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.misc
Subject: Re: RPC Technologies
Message-ID: <1990Aug27.015014.8881@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 27 Aug 90 01:50:14 GMT
Sender: Phil Earnhardt (onecom!wldrdg!pae)
Organization: Netwise, Inc
Lines: 37

In <4c555a34.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> mishkin@apollo.HP.COM (Nathaniel Mishkin) writes:

>> This hasn't really addressed the issue. Either multi-threading is a
>> keystone of NCS, or it isn't. If multi-threading is not available
>> in all NCS environments, then your proposed mechanism of doing
>> asynchronous calls is not portable. The presence or absence of
>> "fork" in MS/DOS has no bearing on the workability of Asynchronous
>> RPC in that environment.

> I don't know what you mean by "keystone".  I tried to address the issue
> by analogy, but I guess I failed.  Any application that uses
> multi-threading (as some NCS-based applications will, as that is the
> only way to achieve asynchrony) will be portable only to systems that
> support multi-threading.

Well, there are several different potential meanings for "keystone".
I've looked over your earlier messages, but never found a definitive
answer to the following questions:

1. Does the implementation of NCS2.0 in an environment require that thread
   support be available in the environment (or that a thread support package
   be ported to that environment)?
   
2. If an environment has native thread support, is that what's used? Does the
   NCS system have the concept of providing a standardized threads API in all
   environments?

3. If the answer to #1 is no, what is the set of functionality that will not
   be available to developers in non-threaded environments?  From your above
   meeeage, it appears as if Asynchronous RPC will not be available in a
   single-threaded environment. Will you be able to have server code run in a
   single-threaded environment? Are there other NCS features that
   won't be available?

Phil Earnhardt          Netwise, Inc.  2477 55th St.  Boulder, CO 80301
Phone:303-442-8280      UUCP: onecom!wldrdg!pae
My opinions do not reflect any official position of Netwise.