new branch mozart-1-3-0-pthread

[Denys Duchier]

Hi Guys,

I started a new branch (tag: mozart-1-3-0-pthread) to investigate the
use of system threads for handling possibly blocking or slow/lengthy
operations.  There is nothing interesting in it yet: I'll announce
when I have something running.

One major application will be a non-blocking connect.  This will allow
us to drop urlc.cc and move all web protocol handling into Oz
libraries.  Among other things, this will make it easy to add support
for proxies in the resolver.

The idea of the design is to submit a "task" to a "processor".  A task
is carried out in 2 steps: (1) an asynchronous slow step which does
the actual work, followed by (2) a synchronous fast step to reflect
results into Oz if any.  The processor will delegate the asynchronous
slow step to a system thread, while the synchronous fast step will run
in the "main" (i.e. emulator) thread.

Cheers,

-- 
Dr. Denys Duchier			Denys.Duchier at ps.uni-sb.de
Forschungsbereich Programmiersysteme	(Programming Systems Lab)
Universitaet des Saarlandes, Geb. 45	http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier
Postfach 15 11 50			Phone: +49 681 302 5618
66041 Saarbruecken, Germany		Fax:   +49 681 302 5615
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