Coroutines in C

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html

by Rexxar • 17 years ago

40 16 17 years ago

chiark.greenend.org.uk

jrockway• 17 years ago

libcoro: http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libcoro.html

draegtun2• 17 years ago

libtask: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=676522

adw• 17 years ago

The guy behind this article (Simon) is the lead author of PuTTY and was the lead author of nasm. Seriously smart dude.

camccann3• 17 years ago

Alas, he's also responsible for one of my worst time-wasting habits: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

That's the same guy? Damn, any productivity I've gotten thanks to PuTTY has totally been cancelled out by those puzzles.

mrshoe• 17 years ago

Stackless Python is cool, but don't you wish there was a library that made coroutines clean and easy in vanilla Python?

EDIT: whoops, I meant to say continuations, as camccann was kind enough to point out.

mcav• 17 years ago

http://eventlet.net/

I'm using it for my startup. Effortless, clean code.

Edit: This runs on the standard Python install; you don't need Stackless.

camccann3• 17 years ago

Vanilla Python has coroutines, as of version 2.5. See here: http://www.python.org/doc/2.5/whatsnew/pep-342.html

Basically it works by letting you send a value into a generator function, which then appears as the return value of the most recent yield statement. I have abused this feature horribly at times to create cooperatively multitasking lightweight pseudo-threads. Good times, that.

What vanilla does not and likely never will have, that Stackless does allow, are full continuations, a.k.a. the Dark Lord of All Flow Control Structures.

duskwuff• 17 years ago

Sadly, using generators as coroutines falls apart badly as soon as you try to perform a subroutine call. There's no easy way (at least, not that I've come up with) to call a coroutine sub from a coroutine without copious glue.

richcollins2• 17 years ago

Io's coroutine library is separate from the VM and open source:

http://dekorte.com/projects/opensource/libcoroutine/

draegtun2• 17 years ago

ditto for Perl: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Coro/

richcollins2• 17 years ago

You can use that library outside of Perl?

loup-vaillant• 17 years ago

Or you could use lazy evaluation (on the producer). In this case, a simple stream is enough. Then, you call both the producer and the consumer (`return consume(produce());`)

Horrible in C, but beautiful in languages with GC and lambdas.

shin_lao• 17 years ago

I can't help but think about how you can build a state machine in C++ templates that achieve the same result with type safety, no overhead and no risk of running into compilers generated problems.

skwiddor• 17 years ago

http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/

http://swtch.com/libtask/

Coroutines in C

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