Lets talk about fibers

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Sun, 2017-01-08 at 09:18 +0000, Suliman via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > Simply picking a worker thread + worker fiber when task is 
> > assigned and sticking to it until finished should work good 
> > enough. It is also important to note though that "fiber" is not 
> > the same as "task". Former is execution context primitive, 
> > latter is scheduling abstraction. In fact, heavy load systems 
> > are likely to have many more tasks than fibers at certain spike 
> > points.
> 
> Could you explain difference between fibers and tasks. I read a 
> lot, but still can't understand the difference.

A fibre is what a thread used to be before kernels supported threads
directly. Having provided that historical backdrop, that seems sadly
missing from the entire Web, the current status is roughly described
by:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_(computer_science)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/796217/what-is-the-difference-betwee
n-a-thread-and-a-fiber

Tasks are things that can be scheduled using threads or fibres. It's
all down to thread pools and kernel processes. Which probably doesn't
help per se, but:

http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/quasar/

Quasar, GPars, std.parallelism, Java Fork/Join all harness all these
ideas.

In the end as a programmer you should be using actors, agents,
dataflow, data parallelism or some similar high level model. Anything
lower level and, to be honest, you are doing it wrong.


-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20170108/7653be87/attachment.sig>