Protothreads Links

Links and recommended reading

This page contains links to some interesting papers and web pages about threads, continuations, and control structures in general that I found useful during the development of protothreads. The list is in no way exhaustive, however, and should not be used as a replacement of a good book on the subject ;-)

• State Threads Library for Internet Applications, similar in principle to protothreads (reduce the need for explicit state machines for event-driven systems), but different in scope (the State Threads Library targets high performance web servers, whereas protothreads target memory constrained embedded systems)
  
  
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Hal Abelson, Jerry Sussman and Julie Sussman
  
  
• The Same Fringe Problem, the killer example of the usefulness of coroutines, from the PortlandPatternRepository.
  
  
• Continuations And Coroutines, from the PortlandPatternRepository.
  
  
• Continuation Explanation, from the PortlandPatternRepository.
  
  
• Understanding Continuations, message to the Lightweight Languages mailing list by Peter J. Wasilko, Esq.
  
  
• Coroutines in C by Simon Tatham.
  
  
• Duff's device, comp.lang.c posting by Tom Duff.
  
  
• Entry: Picothreads - lightweight threading for Java
  
  
• Continuation based web servers, from Andrew Hyatt's Blog.
  
  
• On continuation based web servers, from Chris Double's Radio Weblog.
  
  
• The SMALL language
  
  
• Filaments, fine-grain parallelism both portably and efficiently on shared- and distributed-memory machines, by Vince Freeh, David Lowenthal and Greg Andrews.
  
  
• John K. Ousterhout, held an Invited Talk at the 1996 USENIX Technical Conference with the title "Why Threads Are A Bad Idea (for most purposes)"
  
  
• Lauer, H.C., Needham, R.M., "On the Duality of Operating Systems Structures," in Proc. Second International Symposium on Operating Systems, IR1A, Oct. 1978.
  
  
• G. Lindstrom and M. L. Soffa, "Referencing and Retention in Block-Structured Coroutines", ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) archive Volume 3 , Issue 3 (July 1981).
  
  
• Reynolds, J. C. 1993. The discoveries of continuations. Lisp Symbol. Comput. 6, 3/4, 233--247.
  
  
• R. von Behren, J. Condit, F. Zhou, G. C. Necula, and E. Brewer, "Capriccio: Scalable threads for internet services," in 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2003.
  
  
• Rob von Behren, Jeremy Condit, and Eric Brewer, "Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for High-concurrency Servers)", HotOS IX, May 18-21 2003
  
  
• Atul Adya, Jon Howell, Marvin Theimer, William J. Bolosky, and John R. Douceur. Cooperative task management without manual stack management. USENIX 2002.
  
  
• D. Stein and D. Shah. Implementing lightweight threads. In Proceedings of 1992 USENIX Summer conference, pages 1--9, 1992.
  
  
• Roberto Ierusalimschy's (author of Lua) publications, particularly Ana Lucia de Moura, Roberto Ierusalimschy. Revisiting Coroutines. Technical report MCC15/04, Computer Science Department, PUC-Rio, June 2004. and Ana Lucia de Moura, Noemi Rodriguez, Roberto Ierusalimschy. Coroutines in Lua. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 10(7):910-925, July 2004.
  
  
• Draves, R. P., Bershad, B. N., Rashid, R. F., and Dean, R. W. Using Continuations to Implement Thread Management and Communication in Operating Systems. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 122--136, October 1991.
  
  
• F. Dabek, N. Zeldovich, F. Kaashoek, D. Mazieres, and R. Morris. Event-driven programming for robust software. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, September 2002.
  
  
• Norman Ramsey and Simon Peyton Jones, Featherweight concurrency in a portable assembly language.