Loretta Lux, Keisuke
ACL 7.0 is going to have a new implementation of multiprocessing [via Bill Clementson]:
In the new implementation, processes within Lisp are instances of a CLOS class that can be specialized to get customized behavior. Process objects mediate the programmer's access to threads. The programmer creates an instance of the process class (or of a subclass of the process class) in order to start a parallel computation. The computation's state can be inspected and modified through the use of functions that receive the process object as an argument.
Because processes are CLOS instances, the programmer can create specialized process classes whose instances contain application-specific attributes or behaviors. A server application, for example, could add slots to hold request queues or sockets or transaction-status data structures. After methods defined on initialize-instance and process-terminate could perform application-specific startup and shutdown actions.
This new model allows greatly simplified system design and implementation. It allows the programmer to treat the process and the server instance as a single object, instead of forcing a program structure in which they are two distinct things, one of which owns the other.
A beta version of the new documentation is available.
Posted by jjwiseman at September 17, 2004 11:31 AM