Hi,
What should be the default threading API used by the module 'threadlib'
(and thus also 'lock', 'rwlock', 'cond', etc.) on mingw. There are two choices:
--enable-threads=windows
does not need non-Microsoft DLLs.
--enable-threads=posix
links against winpthreads.dll.
(Whereas Ross Johnson's pthreads-win32 [1] is apparently no longer maintained
for
7 years, therefore no viable option.)
Arguments I can see in favour of --enable-threads=windows:
* The gnulib threads code (lib/glthread/) for Windows is much smaller than the
one in mingw's winpthreads, thus contains likely fewer bugs.
* The gnulib threads code is portable across architectures; no
assembly-language
code.
* It makes me nervous to see that, 5 years after winpthreads was declared no
longer experimental (in 2013), we still see fixes of race conditions and
dirty hacks:
2019-04-26 winpthreads/cond.c: Remove waits for `sema_b` from wait
functions.
2019-04-26 winpthreads/cond.c: Only update `waiters_count_` with
`waiters_count_lock_` locked.
2017-03-10 winpthreads/src/thread.c: Force aligning ESP on 16-byte
boundaries on x86.
2016-11-24 winpthreads mem leak fixed
* One less DLL dependency.
Arguments I can see in favour of --enable-threads=posix:
* The mingw platform is moving away from a "minimal" layer on top of
Windows towards an ISO C + POSIX layer. There is no point in working
against this evolution.
Opinions?
Bruno
[1] https://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32/
