My own baby, Snigl [0]; doesn't even support preemptive threads, only cooperative multitasking; with a twist, since blocking operations are delegated to a background thread pool while yielding when multitasking.
My own baby, Snigl [0]; doesn't even support preemptive threads, only cooperative multitasking; with a twist, since blocking operations are delegated to a background thread pool while yielding when multitasking.
Also, keep in mind that cooperative multitasking may cause unexpected high latencies, which is unfortunate e.g. in GUI applications and web servers; this is a result of queueing theory, and an example is given here: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/10/21/what-happens-when-...
By the way, on POSIX systems there is a way to schedule background IO operations without even using threads: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/aio.7.html
From what I know, cooperative multitasking suffers significantly less from unpredictable performance than preemptive threading. The biggest source of uncertainty in Snigl is the preemptive IO loop.
The things is that I really don't feel like writing a concurrent runtime; been there, done that. I'm planning something along the lines of Erlang's processes and channels based on separate interpreters for those scenarios.
They're implemented (in my mind so far) as preemptive threads, one per interpreter; which makes them slightly more heavy-weight than Erlang's NxM and a nice complement to purely cooperative multitasking.
From my limited experience, Erlang doesn't share data between processes; you throw it over the fence by sending to the process inbox, which is where the locking takes place.
Still, shuffling data between OS threads is an easier problem to solve than serializing between OS processes.