Reacthor - Threads for Thor

Reacthor is a library for multithreading and parallelism for thorlang.

Reacthor is designed to be as simple as possible and enforces this through simple function based execution.

Installation

---

You can either build from source:

git clone https://github.com/Adotweb/reacthor 
cd reacthor
chmod +x ./install.sh 
./install.sh 
cp ./reacthor.so /path/to/your/directory

or download the latest version from the github repositories reacthor.so file;

Usage

Starting Threads

To run a thread you can use the reacthor.start_thread() function;

//import reacthor 
let reacthor = import_lib("reacthor.so");

fn do_something(){
    print "hello";
}

//starts a decoupled thread
reacthor.start_thread(do_something);

//do something else

Note since main threads don't controle whether or not your code has finished, they only run for as long as the main thread is alive. (see loops in off-threads)

Loops in off-threads

When running loops in main threads, they will not keep the main loop alive, even if the arent finished running themselves, this means that the following example:

//import reacthor 
let reacthor = import_lib("reacthor.so");

fn do_something(){
    while(true){
        //do something in here that loops
    }
}

//starts a decoupled thread
reacthor.start_thread(do_something);

, will instantly exit. What you need to do to keep this loop running is introduce a keepalive, through something simple like this:

//import reacthor 
let reacthor = import_lib("reacthor.so");

fn do_something(){
    while(true){
        //do something in here that loops
    }
}

//starts a decoupled thread
reacthor.start_thread(do_something);


//add a keepalive
while(true){
    //do nothing, this just keeps the loop from do_something alive
}

Variables

Since the functions running in off-threads are just simple functions, they can both access and mutate values from outside themselves.

let reacthor = import_lib("reacthor.so");

let value = "hello";

fn mutate_value(){
    value = 6;
}

//this will still mutate value;
reacthor.start_thread(mutate_value);

while(true){
    //at some point (when the off-thread is done running) this will print the new value;
    print value;
}