Bringing Go-Flavored Concurrency to C with POSIX Threads
Go-Flavored Concurrency in C
I explored how closely we can mimic Go's effortless concurrency in C using only POSIX threads for my Solod project. While native OS threads lack the efficiency of lightweight goroutines, I found that with honest tradeoffs, we can build a robust system using mutexes, condition variables, and worker pools. This approach offers a practical path to concurrent C without a runtime, though it requires careful management of thread creation and resource usage.
In the end, I came to the conclusion that you can do quite a lot with pthreads — as long as you're honest about the tradeoffs.
- BoingBoomTschak
Just a small "ackchyually": Go is basically a modern Limbo which is itself based on Alef and there was an official "Alef for C" thing in Plan 9 in libthread (https://9p.io/magic/man2html/2/thread)
EDIT: looks like it was ported on UNIX as part of Plan9Port (https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/master/src/libthread...)
- dandersch
There is also libmill/libdill, which implements go-style coroutines using setjmp and is usable directly from C (not just as a transpilation target).
- fsmv
But select statements are the most important part, and second to that is the fact that goroutines are low cost user space threads