Is there a way to ‘join’ (block) in POSIX threads, without exiting the joinee?

Posted by elliottcable on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by elliottcable
Published on 2010-05-01T23:40:55Z Indexed on 2010/05/01 23:47 UTC
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posix

I’m buried in multithreading / parallelism documents, trying to figure out how to implement a threading implementation in a programming language I’ve been designing.

I’m trying to map a mental model to the pthreads.h library, but I’m having trouble with one thing: I need my interpreter instances to continue to exist after they complete interpretation of a routine (the language’s closure/function data type), because I want to later assign other routines to them for interpretation, thus saving me the thread and interpreter setup/teardown time.

This would be fine, except that pthread_join(3) requires that I call pthread_exit(3) to ‘unblock’ the original thread. How can I block the original thread (when it needs the result of executing the routine), and then unblock it when interpretation of the child routine is complete?

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