bug-gnulib@gnu.org mirror (unofficial)
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>
To: bug-gnulib@gnu.org
Cc: "Miguel Ángel Arruga Vivas" <rosen644835@gmail.com>,
	"Michele Locati" <michele@locati.it>
Subject: buy into mingw winpthreads?
Date: Sat, 18 May 2019 15:07:35 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1724929.9kHdRrDAm7@omega> (raw)

Hi,

What should be the default threading API used by the module 'threadlib'
(and thus also 'lock', 'rwlock', 'cond', etc.) on mingw. There are two choices:

--enable-threads=windows
  does not need non-Microsoft DLLs.

--enable-threads=posix
  links against winpthreads.dll.
  (Whereas Ross Johnson's pthreads-win32 [1] is apparently no longer maintained for
  7 years, therefore no viable option.)
  
Arguments I can see in favour of --enable-threads=windows:

  * The gnulib threads code (lib/glthread/) for Windows is much smaller than the
    one in mingw's winpthreads, thus contains likely fewer bugs.

  * The gnulib threads code is portable across architectures; no assembly-language
    code.

  * It makes me nervous to see that, 5 years after winpthreads was declared no
    longer experimental (in 2013), we still see fixes of race conditions and dirty hacks:
      2019-04-26  winpthreads/cond.c: Remove waits for `sema_b` from wait functions.
      2019-04-26  winpthreads/cond.c: Only update `waiters_count_` with `waiters_count_lock_` locked.
      2017-03-10  winpthreads/src/thread.c: Force aligning ESP on 16-byte boundaries on x86.
      2016-11-24  winpthreads mem leak fixed

  * One less DLL dependency.

Arguments I can see in favour of --enable-threads=posix:

  * The mingw platform is moving away from a "minimal" layer on top of
    Windows towards an ISO C + POSIX layer. There is no point in working
    against this evolution.

Opinions?

Bruno

[1] https://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/



             reply	other threads:[~2019-05-18 13:07 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-05-18 13:07 Bruno Haible [this message]
2019-05-18 20:23 ` buy into mingw winpthreads? LRN
2019-05-18 22:42 ` Bruno Haible

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

  List information: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnulib

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=1724929.9kHdRrDAm7@omega \
    --to=bruno@clisp.org \
    --cc=bug-gnulib@gnu.org \
    --cc=michele@locati.it \
    --cc=rosen644835@gmail.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body. 
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).