A.7 Semaphores, Events, and Other Good Things

Loki's support for multithreading stops here. General multithreading libraries provide a richer set of synchronization objects and functions such as semaphores, events, and memory barriers. Also, the function that starts a new thread is conspicuously absent from Loki—witness to the fact that Loki aims to be thread safe but not to use threads itself.

It is possible that a future version of Loki will provide a complete threading model. Multithreading is a domain that can greatly benefit from generic programming techniques. However, competition is heavy here—check out ACE (Adaptive Communication Environment) for a great, very portable multithreading library (Schmidt 2000).