After spending awhile in python land, I wanted to have “yield” in lisp. After a month or so of stewing, I decided to dive in tonight. My first stab uses threads, not continuations to accomplish this. I made that choice partially because I find the arnesi library intimidating (arnesi has continuations in there somewhere), and partially because I wanted to more practice with threads.
I ended up futzing with bordeaux-threads for a few hours, and eventually punted and used a library that had already solved these problems. My basic test function was:
In retrospect, this may have been a bit pathological. Virtually no time was spent anywhere, and so everything was happening pretty much at once.
My basic threading approach was to make a reader/writer pair:
- run the coroutine (writer) in a thread, and lexically bind
yield
using a flet such that callingyield
set shared memory (with the appropriate locks) - build a lambda (reader) that, when
funcall
ed, waits for the thread to have a value ready, pulls it from shared memory and returns it (with the appropriate locks)
The “with the appropriate locks” bit killed me. I spent a lot of time in deadlock, and had race conditions everywhere. I ran into these issues:
- race condition during startup where the writer thread would start too slowly, missing the notify from the reader to give me a value, and then get stuck waiting for the reader to notify
- race condition at the end of the coroutine, where the writer thread wouldn’t die fast enough, and the reader would get stuck waiting for the writer to notify
- many cases where I wanted to CONDITION-WAIT in one thread before I CONDITION-NOTIFY in another, but kept getting it backward. Adding more layers of locks/condition variables seemed to just defer the problem to another level.
My initial bordeaux-threads version worked great if I ran it from the REPL (with 1+ second pauses for me to run the commands), but the race conditions screwed me when I put it all together.
After a few hours (and a few beers) of debugging, I decided to look at how chanl did it, which rapidly degraded into a chanl-based implementation. This, of course, took 10m to write and worked great:
For reference, my last broken bordeaux-threads version was:
Fun stuff! Good to know I suck at threads, maybe I’ll take another try with less beer later. At least now I can browse simpy source with less envy.
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