I'm signed up to the list again! Thanks to Bill and Marshall for the friendly nudges. On Jul 19, 2004, at 9:18 PM, Miro Jurisic wrote:
MPTasks are layered on top of pthreads, so it should be fine to replace an MPTasks implementation of boost::threads with a pthreads one without hurting anyone, except for clients of boost::threads that depend on the implementation using MPTasks -- but I don't think that assumption is supported.
The MP task implementation is really only interesting for Carbon and Mac OS 9-only targets; the pthreads implementation is more efficient and probably safer under Mac OS X/Mach-O.
By the way, does the boost::threads API assume that preemptive scheduling, or would it be possible to use boost::threads as an abstraction over cooperative threads?
It was always Bill's thought that the API was portable to cooperative threads, but I do not believe that this was ever implemented or tested. Certainly many threaded solutions will not work without preemption, regardless of the thread library they are built against. M.