Scheme fair threads

Abstract

This paper presents Fair Threads, a new model for concurrent programming. This multi-threading model combines preemptive and cooperative scheduling. User threads execute according to a cooperative strategy. Service threads execute according to a preemptive strategy. User threads may ask services from service threads in order to improve performance by exploiting hardware parallelism and in order to execute non-blocking operations.Fair threads are experimented within the context of the functional programming language Scheme. This paper also presents the integration in this language. That is, it presents a semantics for Scheme augmented with Fair Threads and the main characteristics of the implementation.