Re: Tasking Models

[tmoran@bix.com]

> attempted some GNAT/TCP/IP stuff under Win98 and the behavior when tasks
> are involved seems to be that the RTK does not recognize that a thread
> is blocked when a call is made to TCP/IP. (Other tasks starve). Is this
> the same behavior one could expect under WinNT? How about under various

  Are you sure that with Gnat and Win98 one TCP-blocked Ada task
will cause blocking of other Ada tasks?  I don't think that should
happen.  Winsock functions block on a per-thread basis, so the Ada
run time shouldn't know or care whether a particular thread is
blocked on TCP IO - the other threads should continue time-slicing.

  With Windows 3.1, of course, there is only one thread, and you
need to use Windows' WSA functions to avoid blocking it, but I don't
think Gnat even supports 3.1   If you have Claw.Sockets, take a look
at its use of PO_Boxes to use WSA operations to avoid blocking.  In
Windows CE, MS has finally dropped support for the WSA functions,
leaving Windows time-slicing to other threads as the only way to
avoid blocking the entire program.