Go-Flavored Concurrency in C

There is also libmill/libdill, which implements go-style coroutines using setjmp and is usable directly from C (not just as a transpilation target).

https://libmill.org/

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adamrezich a day ago | parent [-]

What on earth is going on when you click the Tutorial button on that website?!

	▲	rurban 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		He obviously got hacked by some Indonesian gaming site

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fsmv a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But select statements are the most important part, and second to that is the fact that goroutines are low cost user space threads

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kccqzy a day ago | parent [-]

Yes exactly. The author’s design decisions only make sense if this is supposed to be a toy language. On using pthreads rather than fibers:

> I decided not to use one. I wanted something dead simple — an approach I could explain in a paragraph, using tools every C programmer already knows. The trade-off is that you lose some performance with fine-grained blocking, but in many real-world situations, pthreads work fine if you use a worker pool.

Sure. You can take a large production Go app and measure how many user space threads are launched; it’s decidedly a lot more than the typical number of threads if you were using pthreads.

And the author didn’t really justify why select isn’t implemented other than implementation difficulty.

	▲	throwaway894345 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I've been using Go regularly since 2012. Worker pools are completely valid and idiomatic in Go. Not sure how you read that quote and concluded "toy".

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Chu4eeno a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was expecting proper green threads (it's not like it's impossible in C, there's several C libraries for doing it).

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BoingBoomTschak a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Just a small "ackchyually": Go is basically a modern Limbo which is itself based on Alef and there was an official "Alef for C" thing in Plan 9 in libthread (https://9p.io/magic/man2html/2/thread)

EDIT: looks like it was ported on UNIX as part of Plan9Port (https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/master/src/libthread...)

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MarkSweep a day ago | parent | next [-]

Russ Cox created libtask, a similar library that runs on multiple UNIXes (UNIXEN?). Based on the COPYRIGHT file, it may be based on libthread.

https://swtch.com/libtask/

It’s a great little library. Very easy to read and understand.

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pjmlp 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And some Oberon-2 in the mix as well, method syntax and unsafe package.

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bitwize a day ago | parent | prev [-]

As I recall, Bell Labs actually abandoned Alef on Plan 9 because the concurrency primitives they wanted were doable in C so they just went with that.

	▲	pjmlp 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nope, they abandoned it because the language design was unsound, and in retrospective a GC was a critical missing piece. "Alef appeared in the first and second editions of Plan 9, but was abandoned during development of the third edition.[1][2] Rob Pike later explained Alef's demise by pointing to its lack of automatic memory management, despite Pike's and other people's urging Winterbottom to add garbage collection to the language;[3] also, in a February 2000 slideshow, Pike noted: "…although Alef was a fruitful language, it proved too difficult to maintain a variant language across multiple architectures, so we took what we learned from it and built the thread library for C." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language) "Problem: with C's memory model in a concurrent world, hard to know when to free items. All the other languages in this talk are garbage-collected, which is essential to easy concurrent programming" http://go-lang.cat-v.org/talks/slides/emerging-languages-cam..., slide 19