Protothreads are an extremely lightweight, stackless type of threads written in portable C code. Protothreads provide blocked waiting and sequential code execution on top of event-driven systems, without the overhead of full multithreading or per-thread stacks. They are designed for severely memory constrained systems, has a very low RAM overhead, and can be used with or without an underlying OS. New in version 1.1 is the PT_YIELD() operation that allows a protothread to yield the CPU.
The Protothreads Library Version 1.1
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Call me a geek, but I find this multi-threading fake out really cool. Hat’s off to the team.
Funny people, those programmers. Those on one end are squeezing every bit of performance out of the machines (Protothreads for example). Those on the other end are wasting computing resources by the truckload (MS and friends for another example). Now if they would start working together, I guess computing would really take off.
Took me a while to understand this… it’s a nice concept all-in-all. This is a stackless cooperative multithreading model, not preemptive as I originally thought. Worth researching into a new variant of C/C++ by implementing new native statements.
The sad reality is that MS programmers are a lot more careful about not wasting memory than, say, the Gnome people who seem to have absolutely zero clue in this regard 🙁 Gnome 1 was usable on machines with 24 megs of memory….
“The sad reality is that MS programmers are a lot more careful about not wasting memory than, say, the Gnome people who seem to have absolutely zero clue in this regard 🙁 Gnome 1 was usable on machines with 24 megs of memory….”
Ran XP SP2 on a 64MB Pentium MMX 266 laptop alone with
Office XP – very usable for browesing and light word typing.
No way to do the similar things on this old laptop with Gnome and Open Office.
“Ran XP SP2 on a 64MB Pentium MMX 266 laptop alone with Office XP – very usable for browesing and light word typing.”
No. Not very usable. At best barely usable or you have too low requirements to your computing experience. Then again I’m one of those people who find XP on a 3 GHz machine way too slow.
heh, xp will runs fine on that for most people when you disable a bunch of crap
Finding XP slow on a 3ghz machine? or are you finding the apps you use on a 3ghz machine slow?
reading about protothreads i stumbled on Contiki OS ,
will i learn something about os developement if i study all documentation about contiki os?
are there other verrry simple os to study and learn something about os?
thanks
>are there other verrry simple os to study and learn something about
Yes. Plan9. Read the papers and the source, 🙂
(as a sidenote Plan9 also uses ”coroutines” extensivly as the programming model – for user space programs – http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rsc/thread/cws.pdf might be a nice read)
Why are we to believe that your alleged experiences with Windows XP are even remotely true? I have a 333mhz system with 128M of RAM that runs Windows XP without a flaw, and is quite usable. I fail to see how some of these folks can run it with a relatively modern system and find such poor performance. I suppose the only real way this would make much sense is if they were too unlearned about their setup to even install the correct drivers for their system’s devices, allowed their system to be filled with OEM-packaged “assistance” software and eight million “spyware” applications.
Donald Ferrone
I suppose the only real way this would make much sense is if they were too unlearned about their setup to even install the correct drivers for their system’s devices, allowed their system to be filled with OEM-packaged “assistance” software and eight million “spyware” applications.
In other words, if they were ordinary users. You can’t have an experienced user heavily modify the default system and then claim that the speed they experience is representative of the OS.