Native Threads in the RTS

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| I've postponed writing up a new proposal again...
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| But I'm going to sum up some requirements that I would like to see
| fulfilled - to make it clearer to others why I'm proposing such
strange
| things...

I've been watching the discussion about native threads, and getting
thoroughly confused. =20

In an attempt to get a handle on what is going on, I have (with Simon M)
written a sort of operational semantics for Concurrent Haskell with
foreign threads, that attempts to abstract away from everything except
the issues that gave rise to these thread proposals.

You can find the document in haskell-report/ffi/threads.tex.  The style
files are in=20
haskell-report/styles/*.sty.  There's a Makefile in haskell-report/ffi.

It's very much a first cut, and it would clearly be good to merge the
threads.txt document with this new Latex one, and in the end have a
final spec. =20

But before investing effort in fiddling with it, I thought it'd be good
to see whether anyone finds it helpful.  It's almost certainly
inconsistent in minor ways, and may need adjustment to accurately
reflect the proposals on the table, but I hope it may help to make the
debate more precise.

Feel free to modify it.  E.g. add inline comments, alternative rules,
and whatever.

Simon

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