Re: Recursive mutexes?

[Tom Lord]

     >> IMO thread programming is hard.  


     > In my "dream scheme" system, I'm thinking they aren't worth the
     > effort.  They slow down access to the store and complicate
     > programming.  I don't even want to think about how to reconcile them
     > with continuations, dynamic-wind, or fluids.


Oh yea...

that also raises one intresting idea:  reconciling java with scheme.

Java semantics seem to me much, much nicer for MIMD (just intuitively,
no elaborate argument).   

Java also seems like a plausible variation on what you'd get if you
wanted to take a subset of Scheme and add declarations.   It's object
model is a little heavy and weird, but it's also pretty simple.

So maybe one approach is a split store: thread-private storage for
Scheme data; shared storage for java-ish objects.

There'd be plenty of other benefits to using Java as "typed Scheme
subset" besides threads, too.

-t