Re: [Q] How do people handle multiple lisp tasks?

[osiris@cs.utexas.edu (Rob Browning)]

>Of course you can fire up several MCL processes, almost like unix.
>Just duplicate MCL on your hard disk and launch each copy.

Thanks, I'll try it.  I have noticed though that apps in the background
seem to have *much* worse performance, even if the foreground app isn't
doing anything.  Maybe my experience is just skewed.

>You can just wait a couple of months and buy MCL 3.0, which has multiple
>threads.

Don't worry, I will :>

All of this, though, doesn't address the desire to have each thread in it's
own address space (or perhaps better yet, a protected partition (a la
Opal)), and it doesn't provide the "convenience" of launching a simple app
multiple times to do multiple things without taking up pointless hard drive
space.  I'd like to be able to start several fetch sessions to different
locations, and I don't think the right answer is *always* "make the
programmer support it in the app".

Imagine trying to do something like pipes in an AppleScript.  If your pipe
has several instances of the same app doing different things, it seems
you'd have to copy it several times before launching the script, and the
script would have to know the names of all the copies (arguably a mess).  I
know that MPW just uses temp files, but that gives up some of the
advantages of pipes.

>The MacOS has supported background tasks since the beginning. A year or two
>ago we released Thread Manager, which gives C programmers some limited
>threading, and with Copland you'll have much more.

Yes the Thread Manager is a *good thing*, and I hope Copland will address
these other issues; I have heard pretty good things, but a year is a long
time to wait...

--Rob.