Processes

[cornell@unix1.cs.umass.edu (Matthew Cornell)]

We are starting an emergency cardiac life support tutor for new
medical students and we need LISP-spawnable multiple processes for the
system's various components. System 7's "Process Manager" is useless
for us as it does not implement preemptive multitasking (meaning if
you hold the mouse button down *nothing* else happens until you let
up!) and it does not support programmatically "forking" or "spawning"
new processes (i.e. starting up a piece of code on its own) unless the
code is "built" in the form of applications, DAs, etc.

I know this is on Apple/MCL's list of very important features missing
from MCL (along with object persistence and incremental GC) but we
need it now. Does anyone have any suggestions for simulating this kind
of multitasking for MCL? Better yet, has anyone *done* this already!?
I've thought of these options:

- Use a different OS, like AUX or Mach. (probs: cost, getting MCL
running, access from MCL)

- Use the "threads" example code in a previous issue Apple Develop. (I
haven't looked at this package at all so I can't evaluate its
applicability.)

- Write it ourselves. Ugh.


Thanks.

matt