Pre-emptive or co-operative concurrency (was: Concurrency)

[Simon Marlow]

On 29 March 2006 17:21, Claus Reinke wrote:

> all of the concurrency implementations discussed so far seem to
> be based on a mixture of preemptive and non-premptive scheduling.
> context-switches happen only on specific events, which every
> thread will usually engage in, although it need not always do so:
> 
> 1 only calls to yield
> 2 any calls to concurrency library api
> 3 any allocation

Not true - in GHC with SMP a thread doing no allocation can be running
concurrently with any number of other threads.  It's only the
single-threaded implementation that has this bug where a thread that
doesn't allocate can starve the other threads.  In fact, even on a
uniprocessor, you can use GHC's SMP mode to work around the bug by
pretending you have 2 CPUs.

GHC's SMP mode is truly preemptive, operations from multiple threads can
be arbitrarily interleaved.  So let's stop saying that all known
implementations are non-preemptive, please ;-)

Cheers,
	Simon