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From: stevep@wrq.com (Steve Poole)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: How do we change the scheduler? (Was Re: Multitasking at home...)
Message-ID: <1991May10.010449.11340@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 10 May 91 01:04:49 GMT
References: <1991Jan14.221532.4431@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <11719@goofy.Apple.COM> <1991Jan16.015035.10356@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>
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In article <1991Jan16.015035.10356@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
>(Larry Rosenstein) at googy.apple.com writes:
>
>> Not true. For most applications, there is nothing special you have to
>> do in order to yield the CPU. It is a normal part of processing user
>> input.
>
>Bzzzzt!  Wrong answer, but thank you for playing our game.
>
>Pausing for i/o is a separate consideration; the "cooperation" required
>for cooperative multitasking is built into the OS i/o routines. Waiting
>for i/o _is_ cooperating. It is the case of a routine that goes CPU
>bound and doesn't bother to give back to the OS the chance to allow
>another task to execute that differentiates cooperative from preemptive
>multitasking.
>
I doubt that you need to explain multitasking nomenclature to Larry or any
of us.  Larry's point was that during the course of a typical application, the
event loop is tripped through frequently enough for cooperative multitasking
to proceed smoothly.

An event loop in the midst of a computation intensive routine is no big deal,
and a standard part of a responsive, well-behaved application.

True, many things could be better.  Bagging old models at the expense of
application base can be done, if riskily.  Multifinder does a fine job for
the vast majority of users, despite lacking some of the features I'd
really like to see.  The world's full of tradeoffs.

-- 
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