Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!unido!mpirbn!p554mve
From: p554mve@mpirbn.UUCP (Michael van Elst)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: threads
Message-ID: <560@mpirbn.UUCP>
Date: 18 Feb 90 11:00:06 GMT
References: <25D99900.51AD@tct.uucp>
Reply-To: p554mve@mpirbn.UUCP (Michael van Elst)
Organization: Max-Planck-Institut fuer Radioastronomie, Bonn
Lines: 31

In article <25D99900.51AD@tct.uucp> jim@tct.uucp (Jim Kunzman) writes:
>
>Having just survived an initial encounter with OS/2, I found that I quite
>liked working with threads.  Although I've owned an Amiga 1000 for five
>years, I find that I'm very ignorant about programming in the Amiga
>environment.  My question is "Does AmigaDos support multiple threads within
>a process like (or unlike) OS/2?"

A direct answer: NO.

BUT !

Where did the need for threads origin from. It's mereley the overhead
introduced to process switching on some operating systems. If there
would be no cost, you can be happy with processes and semaphores
(the latter if you identify threads with _atomic_ actions).

Since the Amiga OS doesn't have this overhead due to lack of
memory mapping, resource tracking, etc..., you can just use processes
to do your work. On the other side, most things in the Amiga OS
is done via message passing which operates almost asynchronous.
Therefore many application that needs multiple processes (or threads
to be efficient) aren't needed. Of course you have to adapt for this
structure.

BTW, last year there had been much discussion about Matt Dillons
light weight processes (or what it has been called). What's the state
of this project ? Would it be usable for 'thread'-like programming ?

Michael van Elst
uunet!unido!mpirbn!p554mve