[LLVMdev] Erlang

[Owen Anderson]

On Jul 24, 2008, at 12:30 PM, Álvaro Castro Castilla wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Sorry for the vagueness.
>
> I'm starting to think about an experimental programming language
> based, among other things, on microthreads, or green threads, as
> Erlang has. I'm still under a very vague stage, just thinking on it,
> so I was wondering on the way this could be achieved.
>
> What I know from microthreads are things like:
>
> * They don't have their own stack
> * Switching between threads is controlled by the application, not  
> the OS

These two can be done in C pretty easily.  Try googling for  
"protothreads" for a library that implements this.  To see how it  
looks in LLVM, compile it down to bitcode and take a look.

> * They are isolated and the only way to exchange information is  
> message passing
>

This one is hard to guarantee in a compiled context, unless you  
implement a lot of stuff to track pointer values.  Remember, all of  
these threads will be sharing an address space.  If you want true  
protection, you'll want something more like fork(), but that defeats  
your other two goals.

--Owen