Of threads, forks and PCLSRing in high-level languages
Amongst the little Common Lisp projects I have been working on at ITA, that we have published as free software, there is single-threaded-ccl, a small modification to Clozure CL (CCL) that allows it to start and run in a single thread. Why is that hack necessary at all? Because I'd like to do useful computations in forks (including but not limited to parallel compilation with POIU or XCVB or robust Erlang-style concurrency), but (a) the upstream CCL insists on always spawning ancillary threads during system initialization to manage interactive I/O, and (b) threads pretty much guarantee that most attempts to compute in a fork will result in massive instability. I'll cover the first issue quickly, but the second issue is what I will develop.
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