SIGALRM, SIGVTALRM, and third party libraries

[Simon Marlow]

On 06/09/10 19:16, Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> 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

Maybe.  As a first step I think we could just document what happens when 
a call is interrupted (pthread_cancel() on POSIX, ??? on Windows) and 
let the user handle it.  Is there even a good lowest-common-denominator 
that we can build an API on top of?

Cheers,
	Simon