RE: Thread.stop, suspend and resume deprecation in 1.2

["Gerald H. Hilderink" <g.h.hilderink@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Oyvind,

It is very sensible of Sun to remove Thread.stop(), Thread.suspend(), and 
Thread.resume(). These methods are dangerous to use and you don't need 
them! With the CJT and JCSP libraries there are no dangerous methods such 
as resume, suspend and stop! The CJT library only uses the Java monitor - 
synchronized(this), wait(), and notify() - construct (I belief this is the 
same for the JCSP library).

I wish they also remove the Thread.setPriority(i) and Thread.getPriority(). 
These methods make priorities in Java absolute; a thread (i.e. process 
object) has priority 5 or 6. The programmer has a lot of responsibility to 
take care of priorities. Relative priorities are much simpler; a process 
has a lower priority than that process and a higher priority than this 
process. This is where the PriParallel comes in. With the PriParallel a 
process itself has no priority, but the thread executing the process has a 
priority assigned by the PriParallel. These threads are encapsulated within 
the Parallel and PriParallel objects.

At the moment we are developing a PriParallel construct which implements an 
embedded scheduler. The PriParallel is a process itself and enables nesting 
PriParallels. With a nested PriParallel construct you will have a scheduler 
running within a scheduler. Each PriParallel supports 8 priorities, 7 
priorities available for processes and the lowest priority is reserved for 
the idle task, skip task, or for a "real-time" garbage collector task. Our 
prototype PriParallel works for our simple test scripts. Now we are testing 
the PriParallel for more complex compositions and we are implementing an 
Interrupt Service Routine framework that simulates external interrupts to 
our scheduler. The embedded scheduler is written in 100% Java and simulates 
a context switch with suspend() and resume(). These methods are faster than 
resp. wait() and notify(). The context switch method could be written in 
native code for very fast context switching. For JDK 1.2 we have found a 
workaround (which would decrease the context switch time a bit) to create a 
context switch method without suspend() and resume() in Java.

Cheers,

Gerald.


Oyvind Teig wrote:

Dear all

Thread.stop, Thread.suspend and Thread.resume will
be deprecated in 1.2

I believe the CSP libraries that have been written
at the moment depend on them at a very few places.

See
http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.2/docs/guide/misc/
threadPrimitiveDeprecation.html

Cheers,

Oyvind Teig, Autronica, Trondheim, Norway
Oyvind.Teig@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Tel.: +47 73 58 12 68
Fax.: +47 73 91 93 20