Manuel Simoni's blog about programming (languages).
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Split stacks!
This could be big - in the October 2010 GNU Toolchain Update (subscribe!), Nick Clifton reports that split stacks have been added to GCC. With split stacks, thread stacks can grow (and shrink (?)) automatically.
I'm building a concurrent language where essentially each object is a thread and I was waiting for this to come out in the standard toolchain. I'm interested in seeing what the splitstack overhead is.
One overhead, that's likely to affect dynamic languages, is that calls through a function pointer become more costly. In the GCC docs it says that they have to go through an additional indirection when split stacks are enabled.
I'm building a concurrent language where essentially each object is a thread and I was waiting for this to come out in the standard toolchain. I'm interested in seeing what the splitstack overhead is.
ReplyDeleteOne overhead, that's likely to affect dynamic languages, is that calls through a function pointer become more costly. In the GCC docs it says that they have to go through an additional indirection when split stacks are enabled.
ReplyDelete