A protothread is a low-overhead mechanism for concurrent programming.
Protothreads function as stackless, lightweight threads, or coroutines, providing a blocking context cheaply using minimal memory per protothread (on the order of single bytes).
Protothreads are used to accomplish a non-preempted form of concurrency known as cooperative multitasking and, therefore, do not incur context switch when yielding to another thread. Within a protothread, yielding is accomplished by utilizing Duff's device within a thread's function and an external variable used in within the switch statement. This allows jumping (resuming) from a yield upon another function call. In order to block threads, these yields may be guarded by a conditional so that successive calls to the same function will yield unless the guard conditional is true.
A feature of protothreads relative to other implementations of coroutines, or proper threads, is that they are stackless. This has advantages and disadvantages. A disadvantage is that local variables within the protothread cannot be trusted to have retained their values across a yield to another context. They must retain their state through the use of static or external, often global, variables. [1] An advantage is that they are very lightweight and therefore useful on severely memory constrained systems like small microcontrollers where other solutions are impractical or less desirable.
Tom Duff, of Duff's device fame, had this to say about the shortcomings of the method: "a similar trick for interrupt-driven state machines that is too horrible to go into. [...] I never thought it was an adequate general-purpose coroutine implementation because it’s not easy to have multiple simultaneous activations of a coroutine and it’s not possible using this method to have coroutines give up control anywhere but in their top-level routine. A simple assembly-language stack-switching library lets you do both of those." [2]
The protothread concept was developed by Adam Dunkels and Oliver Schmidt, [3] based on prior work by Simon Tatham [4] and Tom Duff. [2]
In computing, a context switch is the process of storing the state of a process or thread, so that it can be restored and resume execution at a later point. This allows multiple processes to share a single central processing unit (CPU), and is an essential feature of a multitasking operating system.
In computer science, a thread of execution is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently by a scheduler, which is typically a part of the operating system. The implementation of threads and processes differs between operating systems, but in most cases a thread is a component of a process. Multiple threads can exist within one process, executing concurrently and sharing resources such as memory, while different processes do not share these resources. In particular, the threads of a process share its executable code and the values of its dynamically allocated variables and non-thread-local global variables at any given time.
Coroutines are computer program components that generalize subroutines for non-preemptive multitasking, by allowing execution to be suspended and resumed. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperative tasks, exceptions, event loops, iterators, infinite lists and pipes.
C dynamic memory allocation refers to performing manual memory management for dynamic memory allocation in the C programming language via a group of functions in the C standard library, namely malloc, realloc, calloc and free.
In the C programming language, Duff's device is a way of manually implementing loop unrolling by interleaving two syntactic constructs of C: the do-while loop and a switch statement. Its discovery is credited to Tom Duff in November 1983, when Duff was working for Lucasfilm and used it to speed up a real-time animation program.
In computer science, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program. A continuation implements (reifies) the program control state, i.e. the continuation is a data structure that represents the computational process at a given point in the process's execution; the created data structure can be accessed by the programming language, instead of being hidden in the runtime environment. Continuations are useful for encoding other control mechanisms in programming languages such as exceptions, generators, coroutines, and so on.
In computer science, a generator is a routine that can be used to control the iteration behaviour of a loop. All generators are also iterators. A generator is very similar to a function that returns an array, in that a generator has parameters, can be called, and generates a sequence of values. However, instead of building an array containing all the values and returning them all at once, a generator yields the values one at a time, which requires less memory and allows the caller to get started processing the first few values immediately. In short, a generator looks like a function but behaves like an iterator.
Contiki is an operating system for networked, memory-constrained systems with a focus on low-power wireless Internet of Things devices. Extant uses for Contiki include systems for street lighting, sound monitoring for smart cities, radiation monitoring, and alarms. It is open-source software released under a BSD license.
In computer programming, a return statement causes execution to leave the current subroutine and resume at the point in the code immediately after the instruction which called the subroutine, known as its return address. The return address is saved by the calling routine, today usually on the process's call stack or in a register. Return statements in many languages allow a function to specify a return value to be passed back to the code that called the function.
In concurrent programming, a monitor is a synchronization construct that allows threads to have both mutual exclusion and the ability to wait (block) for a certain condition to become false. Monitors also have a mechanism for signaling other threads that their condition has been met. A monitor consists of a mutex (lock) object and condition variables. A condition variable essentially is a container of threads that are waiting for a certain condition. Monitors provide a mechanism for threads to temporarily give up exclusive access in order to wait for some condition to be met, before regaining exclusive access and resuming their task.
Stackless Python, or Stackless, is a Python programming language interpreter, so named because it avoids depending on the C call stack for its own stack. In practice, Stackless Python uses the C stack, but the stack is cleared between function calls. The most prominent feature of Stackless is microthreads, which avoid much of the overhead associated with usual operating system threads. In addition to Python features, Stackless also adds support for coroutines, communication channels, and task serialization.
Concurrent computing is a form of computing in which several computations are executed concurrently—during overlapping time periods—instead of sequentially, with one completing before the next starts.
Evaluation strategies are used by programming languages to determine two things—when to evaluate the arguments of a function call and what kind of value to pass to the function.
In computer science, a fiber is a particularly lightweight thread of execution.
Adam Dunkels is a Swedish entrepreneur, programmer and founder of Thingsquare.
setcontext is one of a family of C library functions used for context control. The setcontext
family allows the implementation in C of advanced control flow patterns such as iterators, fibers, and coroutines. They may be viewed as an advanced version of setjmp/longjmp; whereas the latter allows only a single non-local jump up the stack, setcontext
allows the creation of multiple cooperative threads of control, each with its own stack.
setjmp.h is a header defined in the C standard library to provide "non-local jumps": control flow that deviates from the usual subroutine call and return sequence. The complementary functions setjmp
and longjmp
provide this functionality.
In computer programming, green threads or virtual threads are threads that are scheduled by a runtime library or virtual machine (VM) instead of natively by the underlying operating system (OS). Green threads emulate multithreaded environments without relying on any native OS abilities, and they are managed in user space instead of kernel space, enabling them to work in environments that do not have native thread support.
C11 is an informal name for ISO/IEC 9899:2011, a past standard for the C programming language. It replaced C99 and has been superseded by C17. C11 mainly standardizes features already supported by common contemporary compilers, and includes a detailed memory model to better support multiple threads of execution. Due to delayed availability of conforming C99 implementations, C11 makes certain features optional, to make it easier to comply with the core language standard.
In computer science, yield is an action that occurs in a computer program during multithreading, of forcing a processor to relinquish control of the current running thread, and sending it to the end of the running queue, of the same scheduling priority.
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