[Patch] C1X threading support

[Niall Douglas]

On 16 Dec 2011 at 22:49, Ed Schouten wrote:

> In my opinion the ISO folks suffer a bit from the Not Invented Here
> syndrome. In an earlier revision of the C1X specification, they even
> described a `struct xtime', which had a purpose identical to `struct
> timespec'. The same holds for the threading API. It can be 1:1 mapped to
> a subset of pthread -- why not simply standardize that subset then?

As someone who sits on said committees, I can tell you that the 
reason why was because at the beginning it was thought that the C1X 
threading API would diverge significantly from the POSIX API. Indeed, 
early drafts of the standard had quite a number of changes. However, 
just recently almost all of those changes have been excised due to 
pressures from the system vendors and the C++ committee who came in 
quite late on wanting feature parity between the two, and C++ had 
chosen a specific subset of POSIX rather than doing anything to try 
and fix its known problems.

Obviously, had we known that from the beginning, things would have 
been done differently. However, there was - in hindsight - a lack of 
realisation just how expensive any significant changes would appear 
to vendors.

Niall

-- 
Technology & Consulting Services - ned Productions Limited.
http://www.nedproductions.biz/. VAT reg: IE 9708311Q. Company no: 
472909.