5.103. kink/thread/THREAD

Provides access to preemptive threads.

5.103.1. THREAD.spawn($thunk)

`spawn` fun starts a new preemptive thread, and runs $thunk on a new abstract stack machine in the thread.

If the runtime supports multiple types of threads, `spawn` chooses the thread system suitable for compute bound tasks. For example, on Java Virtual Machine, the platform thread is chosen.

Precondition:

• $thunk must be a fun which takes no arg

`spawn` returns nada.

Living threads do not prevent the process from exiting, thus they act like Java's daemon threads.

When you spawn a thread, it is automatically detatched from the spawning thread, thus there is no need to join the thread. If you want to block until another thread completes its work, use a concurrency primitive such as MUTEX.

Concurrency:

• Invocation of `spawn` happens-before invocation of $thunk in the new thread.

5.103.2. THREAD.spawn_io($thunk)

spawn_io fun starts a new preemptive thread, and runs $thunk on a new abstract stack machine in the thread.

If the runtime supports multiple types of threads, spawn_io chooses the thread system suitable for IO bound tasks. For example, on Java Virtual Machine, the virtual thread is chosen.

Precondition:

• $thunk must be a fun which takes no arg

spawn_io returns nada.

Living threads do not prevent the process from exiting, thus they act like Java's daemon threads.

When you spawn a thread, it is automatically detatched from the spawning thread, thus there is no need to join the thread. If you want to block until another thread completes its work, use a concurrency primitive such as MUTEX.

Concurrency:

• Invocation of spawn_io happens-before invocation of $thunk in the new thread.

5.103.3. THREAD.id

`id` fun returns an int num as the id of the thread.

Thread ids are unique within the runtime for each thread.

5.103.4. THREAD.name

`name` fun returns a str as the name of the current thread.

Thread names are not guaranteed to be unique. Thread names can be empty.

5.103.5. THREAD.sleep(Seconds)

`sleep` causes the current thread to sleep for the specified `Seconds`.

`Seconds` must be a non-negative num of arbitrary precision. The maximum precision effective in the result depends on the runtime system. For example, in a Kink runtime system on the JVM, the two invocations of STOPWATCH.start in the following program are equivalent. Both tries to sleep 1234 milliseconds.

:THREAD.require_from('kink/thread/')
THREAD.sleep(1.23456) # tries to sleep 1234 milliseconds
THREAD.sleep(1.234)   # tries to sleep 1234 milliseconds