[ragel-users] union operator and thread-local variables

[Adrian Thurston]

When I speak about 'threads' in Ragel it is at a conceptual level. It is 
not the same as an operating system thread. In ragel, a thread's only 
state is the current state variable, which indicating that the state 
machine runtime is attempting to match a defined pattern. There can be 
many such patterns that is is attempting to match. This precludes 
storage of any kind of thread identifier at runtime that is associated 
with the current state. Instead, it would have to be handled at 
compile-time, through action rewriting. This is far beyond the scope of 
the current implementation. Instead the solution is to achieve the same 
thing by hand, as I previously described.

> (1) requires more boilerplate
Yes. Such is life. A previously proposed macro system for ragel would 
relieve this somewhat, but so does relaxing a little bit and moving on 
to more concrete problems ;)

> (2) is less efficient
No, would be more efficient.

> (3) doesn't work in a sub-machine, since it requires fcall/fgoto
No, does not require fcall/fgoto.