[Info-vax] Volatile, was: Re: yet another sys$qiow question

[Bob Gezelter]

On Friday, August 28, 2015 at 4:36:34 PM UTC-4, Bob Koehler wrote:
> In article <55e0994f$0$17002$b1db1813$2411a48f at news.astraweb.com>, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
> > 
> > And when discussing with people who deal in real time, they are all
> > adament that it must all be an event loop, no ASTs allowed. So while I
> > never had to do this, I think it is possible that some types of apps
> > might actually do need to poll the IOSB as part of their real time event
> > loop. (if it is more efficient than checking event flags).
> 
>    Did tons of ASTs in real-time.  Hard real-time.  I'd never want an
>    event loop.
> 
>    But I know a few who don't understand there systems and do want an
>    event loop.

Bob,

Most of the "event loop" type code originally comes from other systems without ASTs or similar constructs. X-Windows originates in a time when there was no standard Unix threading package.

For the record, I have yet to see a case (in over 40 years of systems programming on RSX-11/OpenVMS) where AST delivery overhead was a significant factor. There have been cases where poor planning led to long latencies in AST state (e.g., WAIT-style directives, long computations), but those were poor designs, not a problem with AST efficiency.

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com