Re: What's the difference between a "coroutine" and a "thread" in Lua?

["Gregg Reynolds" <dev@...>]

On 8/10/07, David Given <dg@cowlark.com> wrote:
>
> Just out of interest, under what situations would one use a Lua thread (usual
> terminology from the manual), *without* having it also be a coroutine?

I'm not sure; but see http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~diego/professional/luathread/

Which illustrates the confusion.  A "LuaThread" is not a "lua thread".
 Now suppose the developers decide in the future that it would be a
Good Thing to expose a true thread api as part of the language.
Doesn't seem likely, in light of
http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/hopl.pdf: "we did not (and
still do not) believe in the standard multithreading model, which is
preemptive concurrency with shared memory: we still think that no one
can write correct programs in a language where 'a=a+1' is
notdeterministic."  But who's counting?  "thread" is already taken; I
don't know if one could make it mean "kernel thread" without breakage.

In any case, the point is the current documentation tickles the
Principal of Least Surprise, by assigning a local meaning to a
well-known term.  Not that big of a deal, but we have evidence that
this is a source of confusion.

-g