Protothreads
Protothreads
Protothreads are extremely lightweight stackless threads designed for severely memory constrained systems, such as small embedded systems or wireless sensor network nodes. Protothreads provide linear code execution for event-driven systems implemented in C. Protothreads can be used with or without an underlying operating system to provide blocking event-handlers. Protothreads provide sequential flow of control without complex state machines or full multi-threading.
#include "pt.h" struct pt pt; struct timer timer; PT_THREAD(example(struct pt *pt)) { PT_BEGIN(pt); while(1) { if(initiate_io()) { timer_start(&timer); PT_WAIT_UNTIL(pt, io_completed() || timer_expired(&timer)); read_data(); } } PT_END(pt); }Example protothreads code.
While protothreads originally were created for memory-constrained embedded systems, it has found many uses as a general purpose library too. Examples include multimedia streaming server software, grid computing research software, and MPEG decoding software for Internet TVs.
Main features:
- Very small RAM overhead - only two bytes per protothread and no extra stacks
- Highly portable - the protothreads library is 100% pure C and no architecture specific assembly code
- Can be used with or without an OS
- Provides blocking wait without full multi-threading or stack-switching
- Freely available under a BSD-like open source license
Example applications:
- Memory constrained systems
- Event-driven protocol stacks
- Small embedded systems
- Sensor network nodes
- Portable C applications
For example usages, see the Examples page.
The protothreads library is released under an open source BSD-style license that freely allows for both non-commercial and commercial usage. The only requirement is that credit is given. Download the full source code here.
Protothreads were invented by Adam Dunkels with support from Oliver Schmidt <ol.sc@web.de>.