ANN: Threading extension v2.4 released
Zoran Vasiljevic
I'm pleased to announce the 2.4 release of the threading extension
to the Tcl scripting language. This extension exposes threading
capabilities of the Tcl API to you, the script programmer. It allows
you to create and manage OS threads from your scripts and share data
between them in a protected and safe fashion.
The extension hides most of the complexities of the thread programming
from the script writer so it can be effectively used by less (thread)
experienced programmer.
Where to get the new release:
-----------------------------
Threading extension sources are freely available from the Tcl
SourceForge project's file distribution area:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10894
Summary of Changes since version 2.2:
-------------------------------------
o. Documentation is now available in both HTML and nroff format.
Thanks to Joe English and Rolf Ade for their valuable help
in getting the (TMML) bits and pieces together.
The documentation is in reference format. The tutorial-like
version of the documentation is going to be included in future
releases of the extension.
o. New set of thread shared variable commands. It is a complete
rewrite, allowing you to store Tcl objects in thread shared arrays.
In the previous release, only the object string representation
has been stored, affecting performance when building large and
complex shared data structures. Much care has been taken internally
to get a safe and protected shared object storage w/o explicit
external locking. It is now very fast and convenient to use.
All new commands reside under the "tsv::" namespace. For the
backward compatility with the 2.2 version, all sv_* commands are
still available. Please note that support for those might be
dropped in future (major) releases of the extension.
o. New thread preserve/release management interface. This allows you
to control access to threads in a controllable, reference-counted
fashion.
o. New asynchronous script back-firing so you can integrate thread
message passing in regular event-loop processing. This is built
as an option into the standard "thread::send" command.
o. The extension can be compiled as module for the AOLserver 3.+.
This is still not integrated into the standard configure/make
process though, but can be done manually by declaring some
compile time directives. The support for configure/make will
be included in next releases of the extension.
Also, all of the thread shared variable commands can act as the
direct replacement of the AOLserver's nsv_* command set,
which was taken as a model for this work, in the first place.
o. New thread::configure command which allows you to tune some
low-level thread options in a similar fashion as the standard
Tcl "fconfigure" command.
I have tested the extension under Solaris 2.5.1-2.8 (both GCC
and SunWorks CC compiler), Linux (SuSE 7.2-8.0, RedHat 7.1-7.3)
and W2K (both MinGW and MSVC++ compilers). Other platforms are
not tested, but if there is a proper pthreads implementation,
it should be possible to get the extension to compile and load.
If you have any problems, please post your questions to the
comp.lang.tcl newsgroup or to the Bug tracker on the SourceForge.
Happy threading!
Zoran Vasiljevic
Archiware
[[Send Tcl/Tk announcements to tcl-an...@mitchell.org
Announcements archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tcl_announce/
Send administrivia to tcl-announ...@mitchell.org
Tcl/Tk at http://tcl.tk/ ]]