Re: What's the difference between a "coroutine" and a "thread" in Lua?
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- Subject: Re: What's the difference between a "coroutine" and a "thread" in Lua?
- From: Duck <duck@...>
- Date: 2007年8月14日 08:24:51 +1000 (EST)
Can you please list such tasks, where built-in
pre-emptive parallelism would have been useful.
I think it's a matter of choice and of widening the appeal of Lua a
little.
I find it pretty hard to write correct code using low-level pthreads-style
multitasking because of the need to take (great) care to handle all the
synchronisation by hand. But many recently-blooded programmers are
used to it, and expect it, even though they too might not actually be
terribly good at it :-)
OTOH, I find an API like LuaTask (q.v.), which is implemented atop
pthreads-style multitasking, a very natural way to write programs with
multiple parallel tasks of execution. And LuaTask would, I suspect, be
fairly easy to implement on top of an officially-included and more generic
multitasking API such as LuaThreads (see some recent earlier, errr, email
thread about this).
I guess the appeals of a core-but-optional LuaThreads or LuaTask include:
* true multiprocessing, handy where there is more than one CPU (as there
so often is these days);
* no need scrupulously to avoid blocking I/O in your code (much more
complex than it sounds, especially when making queries into third-party
back ends which access disk, such as SQL databases);
* no instant collapse in performance when you slip up on the previous
point and inadvertently perform some blocking operation.
Perhaps even some evil scheme for allowing multi-tasking between
multiple Lua states with such a scheme could be even more useful?
This is sort-of what LuaTask does. It's kind of like old-school
share-nothing parallelism (anyone remember the Transputer :-) implemented
inside Lua using OS-level threads, and with a built-in, simple and
inexpensive IPC/synchronisation mechanism using message passing.
The only problem with LuaTask is that (sorry, Daniel :-) the current
release version has an unremediated critical bug, and that there are some
question marks over its production-readiness from at least one theoretical
analysis, and from one practical report, recently published on this list.
But the core idea is very neat. Multithreaded multitasking without all
those !$@%^% mutexes:-)
I have also, a couple of years back, used LuaThreads and found it very
handy in numerous cases. For example, with a little bit of high-level glue
to handle the !$@#$ mutexes it was easy to write a sort-of inetd in Lua,
which allowed me to turn simple Lua scripts into concurrent network
servers without hassling about shielding all my I/O in non-blocking
wrappers, portably on Linux and Windows. And for writing simple
"backgrounder" utilities (such as "print this whilst I go on in the
foreground with other stuff") it's certainly handy, if not strictly
necessary, to have true preemptive multiprocessing. All this with very
little additional run-time code (which only needs to be loaded if you want
or need it).
My 2ドル.