[Fwd: Re: [cells-devel] Cells and Threads]

[Ken Tilton]

Duane Searsmith wrote:

> Thank you Ken and Attila for your feedback.  I think I have a fair 
> understanding of the issues now.  I'm going to do some brainstorming 
> over exactly how I would like the threads to interact with the Cells 
> engine and then try some experiments with different locking strategies 
> and see what happens.
> I'll report back on what I discover. 

OK, don't be afraid to ask. And don't forget about lazy cells. :) If you 
use those, that creates other issues. I don't much.

One thing that might help (or hurt)  is that in Cells3 I started forcing 
the programmer to single-thread model perturbations:

   (with-integrity (:change ...) (setf <some-cell> ...)

....and there are multiple queues for follow-up work and propagation 
arising from any change, including a "client" queue for application 
work, and one can specify either or both a client queue sort function 
and client queue handler. So there might be some place to wire in a 
little thread awareness and let things keep moving despite activity by 
other threads. And with all that information around, there may also be a 
way for the programmer to indicate they are taking responsibility for 
data integrity so Just Let Me Do This. ie, They may know X is against 
the rules but X is quite safe so Just Do It.

kt