Show HN: Faster Fibers using Threads
github.comIt's a shame this experimental Google proposal for userspace thread scheduling never got picked up: https://blog.linuxplumbersconf.org/2013/ocw/system/presentat...
The basic API (see page 17) consisted of:
pid_t switchto_wait(timespec *timeout)
- Enter an 'unscheduled state', until our control is
reinitiated by another thread or external event (signal).
void switchto_resume(pid_t tid)
- Resume regular execution of tid
pid_t switchto_switch(pid_t tid)
- Synchronously transfer control to target sibling
thread, leaving the current thread unscheduled.
While I'm all for more options, and against deprecating commonly used functionality; the results I'm getting say that first class context switching support isn't really as important as we like to pretend.
For performance, no. But for simplifying the software stack and making it easier to express common control flow abstractions in a consistent, unified, and compatible manner it's hugely important. Not that this API would solve everything, or even much at all, as a practical matter, but it's a very neglected aspect of modern OS and language design.
I can write C code that calls Perl code that calls Java code that calls Python code quite readily, except if I want to use any of their concurrency abstractions like coroutines, async/await, futures, etc. But all of those abstractions merely box function invocation state--otherwise known as a call stack--for a single logically synchronous flow of execution. And we know that all those languages can easily share call stacks.
The issue is that operating systems don't provide a consistent contract for creating and transferring control to different call stacks. They provide OS threads but those are scheduled by the kernel and their implementation and behavior are unnecessarily intermingled with tangential aspects of the runtime environment. It would be like if every time you wanted to call a function you had to use some special kernel facility; not the kind of thing that promotes easy and performant interoperability among different languages or even different libraries.