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. To enable C programmers to continue using the usual libraries within multithreaded actors, the ChorusOS operating environment provides a set of adapted C libraries. These can be used from different threads of a given actor without encountering problems.

Some of these adapted libraries (printf(), fprintf(), fopen(), and malloc()) were used in the previous examples. 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 required no modification and 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.