Re: Threads vs Processes

Shridhar Daithankar <shridhar_daithankar@persistent.co.in> writes:
> We really don't need threads to replace existing functionality. That
> would be dog work.

No, that's not the point at all.  The problem we are facing at the
moment with the Windows port is lack of fork(), which means there's
no way for separate-subprocess backends to inherit variable values
from the postmaster.  Bruce has been trying to fix that by having the
subprocesses somehow reload or re-deduce all those variables; which
is messy, bug-prone, and probably race-condition-prone too.  In a
threaded implementation it would maybe be relatively easy to initialize
a new thread's TLS by copying the postmaster thread's TLS, in which case
a whole pile of as-yet-unwritten Windows-only code won't be needed.

            regards, tom lane