Threads and Libraries

As illustrated in the previous example, it is often the case that C and C++ libraries have been designed for UNIX processes which were initially mono-threaded entities. In order to allow C programmers to continue using the usual libraries within multithreaded actors, the ChorusOS operating environment provides a set of adapted C libraries which may be used from different threads of a given actor without encountering problems.

In the previous examples, some of these adapted libraries, such as printf(), fprintf(), fopen(), and malloc(), were already used. All of these C libraries have been adapted to work efficiently even within a multithreaded actor. Modifications are not visible to the programmer. They rely mainly on synchronization such as mutexes for protecting critical sections and on the per-thread data mechanism to store per-thread global data.

Some libraries did not require any modification and can work in a straightforward fashion within a multithreaded actor. These libraries, such as strtol() (string to lower case), work exclusively on local variables and do not access or generate any global states.