Re: Coroutines

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr at cs dot tamu dot edu>]

Andrew Haley <aph@redhat.com> writes:

| Dustin Laurence writes:
|  > On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 02:05:13PM -0700, Mike Stump wrote:
|  > 
|  > > If every language were going to have the feature, then, moving it  
|  > > down into the mid-end or back-end might make sense, but I don't think  
|  > > it does in this case.
|  > 
|  > Personally, I'd like, and use, decent coroutines in C.  But perhaps I am
|  > the only one.
|  > 
|  > > I wouldn't start with pthreads I don't think.
|  > 
|  > That was my thought--I played with it some but I intended it as a bit of
|  > threads practice.  Using threads to emulate a synchronous construct just
|  > seems *wrong.*
| 
| You need a way to switch from one stack to another, but why not leave
| open the possibility of implementing this in a number of different
| ways?

Yup.

| You need detach() and resume() [in Simula notation] and these
| can be provided either by low-level stack-switching or by invoking a
| pthreads library.

I wouldn't use a thread library because many uses of coroutine are to
implement low-cost, efficient, alternatives to thread where, for example,
the full power of threads are not essential.

-- Gaby