On Sat, 11 Jun 2005, rms@gnu.... wrote:

>     I think an alternate solution is to have no shared variables between
>     threads once they are forked, and communicate through standard IPC
>     (pipes, semaphores, etc.).
>
> This is not possible with shallow binding.  All Lisp programs
> use the same set of symbols, and each symbol has a value.
> Many symbols' values have important standard meanings.

I'm not sure I understand the problem.  Do you mean that if a user
changes variable A in thread 1, he expects thread 2 to also notice the
change for certain global variables?  That's easy to do, if you
consider that such global variables are few and far between compared
to local per-thread variables.  defvar and similar could just be
allowed to make a variable :global, and then any change in any thread
would be propagated to the other threads by the VM.

I realize this is extra work for the programmers.  Multithreading is
never free, but the advantages are significant as well.

Ted



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