makrosäikeet

Makrosäikeet, often translated as "macro threads" or "macro-lines" in English, are a programming concept primarily found in the context of Lisp dialects, particularly Scheme. They represent a mechanism for managing concurrency and parallelism within a Lisp environment.

Unlike traditional threads that are directly managed by the operating system, macro threads are implemented within the Lisp runtime. This allows for a higher degree of control and flexibility for the programmer. A key characteristic is that macro threads are typically scheduled cooperatively. This means that a macro thread must explicitly yield control for another macro thread to run. This cooperative multitasking can prevent certain types of race conditions that can occur with preemptive threading, where the operating system can interrupt a thread at any time.

Macro threads can be used to implement various concurrency patterns, such as asynchronous operations, parallel computations, and event-driven architectures. They often work in conjunction with other Lisp features like continuations and coroutines to provide powerful ways to handle multiple tasks concurrently without the overhead of full operating system threads. The implementation details and specific features of macro threads can vary between different Lisp implementations.