Re: cooperative multitasking

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis@...>]

On Fri, 2002-06-07 at 12:55, Francis Burton wrote:
> At 11:53 AM 6/7/02 -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> >> It's not a toy at all! It's extremely useful and I appreciate it.
> >> However, it may not be what you are looking for; calling it cooperative
> >> multitasking may be a bit misleading.
> >
> >Yes, I meant it as a toy multi-tasker.
> 
> What exactly do you mean by 'toy'? Are you saying that it
> has no real-life uses, or that it there are other limitations
> (such as performance) which make it impossible to be used in
> any real world application?

I meant that it doesn't really multi-task in the way other had implied
it would - it doesn't really multi-task at all. ~,^

Something I'd be looking for, and again I don't see why it hasn't been
added to Lua proper yet, is a full "pre-emptive" multi-tasker.  One
that's implemented in the interpreter proper with all the
speed/efficiency benefits.

I recall reading that there is still a lot of information stored on the
C-stack in the Lua interpreter across function calls, which makes such
multi-tasking difficult (yet Ruby, which is based on a tree-node
approach, pulls it off - haven't looked to see what tricks they use).

This exact lack of multi-tasking is what prompted me to start Scriptix,
which has full multi-tasking (not optimized worth crap yet, but it's not
even close to as mature as Lua yet).

I certainly will have to pick my words more carefully in the future - I
wouldn't have thought referring to a lite-weight scripting language's
feature as a "toy" would be taken as a mini-flame.  Maybe it's just me,
but I consider everything short of C a toy.  ~,^  Many of them useful
toys, mind you...

> 
> Please elaborate!
> 
> Francis
>