Light-weight threads

[Norbert Nemec]

ds wrote:
> == Quote from Norbert Nemec (Norbert at Nemec-online.de)'s article
>> Hi there,
>> I just found that recent change in the language to make all global
>> variables thread-local by default. This makes me think of a major
>> performance problem: every thread creation will have to copy all the
>> thread-local variables. This makes it impossible to efficiently spawn
>> many light-weight threads even if they do not make use of the global
>> variables at all.
>> I guess I am not the first one to spot this problem? I believe that
>> thread creation should come with as little overhead as possible. Maybe a
>> concept of light-weight threads based on side-effect free code could
>> complement the regular threads?
>> Just a quick idea to throw into discussion...
>> Greetings,
>> Norbert
> 
> What's wrong with using thread/task pools for these situations?

That's always an option, of course. It just adds one layer of complexity 
to the code.

If spawning a thread were as cheap as putting a task in a queue you 
could simply spawn one thread per task and leave it to the scheduler to 
handle it all. Assuming, of course, that the scheduler is clever enough 
to handle it efficiently.