thread priorities?

[Simon Marlow]

On 31 March 2006 02:49, John Meacham wrote:

> Thinking about it some. I think we will need some sort of very basic
> thread priorities.
> 
> honoring these priorities will be _manditory_ for cooperative
> implementations but advisory for preemptive ones that meet the
> fairness guarentees. priorities are sometimes needed in cooperative
> systems to ensure certain things get run, but the fairness guarentees
> of preemptive systems make them less important. Another reason to
> make them advisory in preemptive implementations is because they
> might be using OS level threads and hence not have their own
> scheduler to tweak priorities in. 
> 
> I am thinking
> 
> threadSetPriority :: ThreadID -> Int -> IO ()
> threadSetPriority = ...

I'd rather not, if we can avoid it.  The only rationale I'll offer is
that we don't have it in GHC, and people manage to do a lot without
priorities.  Priorities come with a whole can of worms that I'd rather
not deal with.

Cheers,
	Simon