I think ucontext is an excellent starting point for a general implementation. You just abstract it with a thin veneer and adopt faster implementations as needed where applicable.
It's slower than Boost Context for sure, but still around 10x faster than (ab)using Pthreads on Linux. Until someone releases a faster standalone C library it's still the fastest portable solution for projects like Cixl that can't afford dragging C++ around.
There's already many fast, portable, standalone C libraries for this. For instance, see table 1 of https://www.gnu.org/software/pth/rse-pmt.ps. The assembly code for a context switch is pretty minimal (on most platforms, it's just setjmp and longjmp) if you don't try manage the signal state. I would be surprised if there was significant variance in performance (other than whether it chooses to switch the signal mask). Additionally, many language runtimes directly support it without any extra effort on your part. So if you choose to instead use one of those language, you get a fast portable solution without needing to do any extra work to pick a support library (for example, D-Lang LDC, PyPy, Go, Julia).
newnewpdro|7 years ago
I think ucontext is an excellent starting point for a general implementation. You just abstract it with a thin veneer and adopt faster implementations as needed where applicable.
bgongfu|7 years ago
manwe150|7 years ago