[Info-vax] pthread_kill() replacement for VMS?

[David Froble]

John Reagan wrote:
> On Friday, July 28, 2017 at 10:58:53 AM UTC-4, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> On 2017-07-28 00:18:07 +0000, David Froble said:
>>
>>> Well, I guess that would depend on the multi-tasking being performed, 
>>> and such.   Sure, an OS provides for multiple processes.  However, a 
>>> single process may need to control and coordinate multiple "things".
>> Distributed job schedulers have made that effort easier, and with less 
>> bespoke code necessary.   DLM and termination mailboxes and TCP and the 
>> queue manager are all good tools and can be useful here, but adapting 
>> those pieces and frameworks to scheduling is a fair amount of bespoke 
>> code.  But processes and process scheduling and distributed schedulers 
>> are different from threading, and threading is something that really 
>> doesn't exist in BASIC short of KP Threads or such.  I've yet to 
>> encounter threaded BASIC code.   Lots of AST-based code and 
>> multiple-process code written in BASIC certainly, but not threading.
>>
> 
> The BASIC RTL is not thread-safe.  There is something in the BASIC release notes about it.  I don't think the COBOL RTL is thread safe either.  I don't about Fortran.  I know the Pascal RTL IS thread safe since I did that work and I know a few Pascal customers that use threading with Pascal.
> 

No, VAX/DEC Basic doesn't support threads.

Since I've spent time there, I won't know nearly as much about using threads as 
some might.  With one exception, and my ignorance, I think there may have been 
only one time when the use of threads would have been helpful.  Mainly, I don't 
miss the capability.

But since you've posted here John, can I ask, what type of effort is involved in 
implementing threads in a compiler / language?  Or, would it be easier to start 
over.  Would allowing threads then disqualify some other things the language 
supports?

Could VAX/DEC Basic be modified to support threads, if you've looked at it 
enough to take a guess?

Not looking for anything, just curious.