Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!bnrgate!brchh104!brchs1!bnr.ca!rice.edu!sun-spots-request
From: burdick@hpspdra.HP.COM (Matt Burdick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Re: RPC Technologies
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Message-ID: <3204@brchh104.bnr.ca>
Date: 4 Jun 91 18:40:00 GMT
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Approved: sun-spots@rice.edu
X-Original-Date:    Thu, 16 Aug 1990 23:11:30 GMT

> Please reread my earlier posting--you have a couple of factual errors.
> Netwise does support multiple threads.

I thought one of the bad things about NCS was the difficulty of
porting it to platforms that didn't easily support multiple
lightweight task or thread emulation.  Your previous posting doesn't
make it clear whether it is RPC Tool that provides multiple thread
capability or whether it will merely continue to function in an
environment (such as Mach) that already provides it.

> Also, any multi-threaded approach must still use asynchronous
> semantics.  You would have to be using both threads and asynchronous
> semantics.  How could this be cleaner and easier?

The threads *are* the asynchronous semantics.  Picture two threads:
one is reading from a device and inserting new data in a global
database, the other is providing the user interface to the database.
Except for watching for mutual exclusion, neither thread needs to know
about the other's existance.  A third thread could easily be added
that tweaks the database in a different way.  The code for the first
two threads would not need to be modified in any way.

						-matt
-- 
Matt Burdick                |   Hewlett-Packard
burdick@hpspd.spd.hp.com    |   Intelligent Networks Operation