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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Multi-threading
From: tstarling@wikimedia.org (Tim Starling)

Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> Just an uninformed thought: maybe the existing TSRM framework could 
>> be leveraged to provide some simple multithreading support to the user. 
>
> TSRM is meant to support "share nothing" in threaded environment. 
> Multi-threading should support sharing data (including locking & 
> synchronization) which is quite different business.
>
> It may be easier to do pseudo-multithreading a-la Python, where 
> there's only one thread running at each moment of time, but they can 
> switch when other threads are waiting for something like I/O or some 
> event. That would require some work for defining engine state and 
> enabling switching, but it's easier than full multithreading support.
> Unfortunately, as for now nobody showed real interest in doing that.

I'm saying that you could make multiple "share nothing" instances
available to the user, for a programming model intermediate between
multiprocessing and traditional threading.

Python-style multithreading wouldn't be useful for the applications I
have in mind.

-- Tim Starling