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Re: continuations and threads

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 18 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 18 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Blandy <jimb@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Mike> The C FFI Richard Kelsey and I implemented for Scheme 48 does this as
Mike> well.  Here's the relevant blurb from the documentation:
Mike> 
Mike> There are some complications that occur when mixing calls from C to
Mike> Scheme with continuations and threads. C only supports downward
Mike> continuations (via longjmp()). Scheme continuations that capture a
Mike> portion of the C stack have to follow the same restriction. For
Mike> example, suppose Scheme procedure s0 captures continuation a and
Mike> then calls C procedure c0, which in turn calls Scheme procedure s1.
Mike> Procedure s1 can safely call the continuation a, because that is a
Mike> downward use. When a is called Scheme 48 will remove the portion of
Mike> the C stack used by the call to c0. On the other hand, if s1
Mike> captures a continuation, that continuation cannot be used from s0,
Mike> because by the time control returns to s0 the C stack used by c0
Mike> will no longer be valid. An attempt to invoke an upward
Mike> continuation that is closed over a portion of the C stack will
Mike> raise an exception.

Jim> Actually, this is less powerful than what I described.  In Roland's
Jim> system, you don't need to unwind the C stack when s1 invokes a.  You
Jim> only need to unwind the C stack when s0 returns.  If s0 instead
Jim> invokes some continuation b captured by s1, that's fine.

I'm not sure I'm getting what's going on here:  I *want* the C stack
to be unwound (it's a trivial-enough operation), so that the Scheme
heap references in the C activation records get freed---you might
get a space leak otherwise.

-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla