SIGALRM, SIGVTALRM, and third party libraries

[Edward Z. Yang]

Excerpts from Simon Marlow's message of Mon Sep 06 05:57:59 -0400 2010:
> What did you have in mind with respect to "portable equivalents of 
> pthread functions"?  I'm not sure we need to do anything along these 
> lines at all, and I'd much rather we didn't enforce any threading 
> abstraction on foreign clients.

My thought here is that we want interruptible FFI code to be able
to say when it’s entering critical sections in a platform independent
way, and if it uses pthread functions to this effect, it is then tied
to POSIX.  Something more portable would be for the program to tie
itself to our OS threading library OSThreads.c

Cheers,
Edward