From some testing with directly using C code, pthread_t on macos is 8 bytes.
This is my test code:
```
#include <assert.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <pthread.h>
void* PosixThreadMainRoutine(void* data)
{
// Do some work here.
for (int i = 0; i < 2000000000; i++) {
}
return NULL;
}
pthread_t LaunchThread()
{
// Create the thread using POSIX routines.
pthread_attr_t attr;
pthread_t posixThreadID;
int returnVal;
returnVal = pthread_attr_init(&attr);
assert(!returnVal);
returnVal = pthread_attr_setdetachstate(&attr, PTHREAD_CREATE_JOINABLE);
assert(!returnVal);
int threadError = pthread_create(&posixThreadID, &attr, &PosixThreadMainRoutine, NULL);
returnVal = pthread_attr_destroy(&attr);
assert(!returnVal);
if (threadError != 0)
{
// Report an error.
}
return posixThreadID;
}
int main() {
pthread_t t = LaunchThread();
void ** ret;
printf("%d, %d\n", sizeof(t), sizeof(pthread_t));
int val = pthread_join(t, ret);
printf("%d", val);
return 0;
}
```
running this on macos reports `8, 8`.
Then I made the proposed changes and errors I was having with threads completely went away.
This is useful to correctly convert strings from a buffer possibly containing multiple multiple substrings.
The resulting utf8 string is not null terminated, even if the backing memory might be null terminated.
Also do some cleanup and refactoring of the thread, sync and time APIs.
- remove 'semaphore_release' because 'post' and 'wait' is easier to understand
- change 'semaphore_wait' to '*_wait_for' to match Condition
- pthreads can be given a stack, but doing so requires the user to set up the guard
pages manually. BE WARNED. The alignment requirements of the stack are also
platform-dependant; it may need to be page size aligned on some systems.
Unclear which systems, however. See 'os.get_page_size', and 'mem.make_aligned'.
HOWEVER: I was unable to get custom stacks with guard pages working reliably,
so while you can do it, the API does not support it.
- add 'os.get_page_size', 'mem.make_aligned', and 'mem.new_aligned'.
- removed thread return values because windows and linux are not consistent; windows returns 'i32'
and pthreads return 'void*'; besides which, if you really wanted to communicate how the
thread exited, you probably wouldn't do it with the thread's exit code.
- fixed 'thread.is_done' on Windows; it didn't report true immediately after calling 'thread.join'.
- moved time related stuff out of 'core:os' to 'core:time'.
- add 'mem.align_backward'
- fixed default allocator alignment
The heap on Windows, and calloc on Linux, both have no facility to request alignment.
It's a bit of hack, but the heap_allocator now overallocates; `size + alignment` bytes,
and aligns things to at least 2.
It does both of these things to ensure that there is at least two bytes before the payload,
which it uses to store how much padding it needed to insert in order to fulfil the alignment
requested.
- make conditions more sane by matching the Windows behaviour.
The fact that they were signalled now lingers until a thread tries to wait,
causing them to just pass by uninterrupted, without sleeping or locking the
underlying mutex, as it would otherwise need to do.
This means that a thread no longer has to be waiting in order to be signalled, which
avoids timing bugs that causes deadlocks that are hard to debug and fix.
See the comment on the `sync.Condition.flag` field.
- add thread priority: `thread.create(worker_proc, .High)`
