🚀 go-pugleaf

From article <3268@zeus.TEK.COM>, by bobr@zeus.TEK.COM (Robert Reed):
> This is the crux of the issue.  In your narrowed view of multitasking, IPC
> requirements may exclude such systems as Multifinder.  Yet, Multifinder fits
> broader views of multitasking which rely only on the ability to share
> resources among a set of simultaneously executing processes.  

Consider this a general posting rather than a response to Robert's
comments in particular...
   Is the following a reason to prefer Multifinder's event-driven
multitasking to "real" timesliced multitasking?
   If I'm running some sort of package which does real-time things,
like timing events, and doing things at certain times, I presumably
don't want the OS occasionally kicking in to attempt a re-scheduling,
even if nothing else is runnable. At least with Multifinder's
approach, if my time-critical application has the machine, it keeps it
until it's finished.
   In fact, timing things on input is probably OK as long as you have
kernel routines to timestamp stuff. But output still seems like a
problem.
   The application which came to mind this morning: MIDI sequencing
software. If my sequencer is going flat out, I'm playing into it from
my keyboard, and it has to get notes and so on out to the noise boxes
within milliseconds. When it's stopped (and awaiting mouse input),
then I can "swap" it out and look at something else, but when it's
going, I don't want anything else to trip it up.
   Here's a technical question, out of curiosity - I presume the
MacOs's GetNextEvent (or whatever) is a "let me sleep until mouse or
window or keyboard event" kind of call. So: how does one extend the
set of required events (for example: let me sleep until mouse or
window or keyboard or character at the modem port)? Is the set of
event types infinitely extensible? Or are there only ever going to be
a fixed number?

> Robert Reed, Tektronix CAE Systems Division, bobr@zeus.TEK
-- 
Nick Rothwell,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		nick%lfcs.ed.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
		<Atlantic Ocean>!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!nick
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