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Coroutines in C
By Mark VandeWettering 3/5/2005 9 Comments

I remember blinking a few times the first time someone showed me Duff’s device. It made me ask
“is that really legal C”. Simon Tatham’s article Coroutines in C comes very close to provoking the
same response. Wacky, wacky code.

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Tom Duff says:

3/6/2005 at 10:04 am

Yeah. I knew this. In my piece about The Device, I mention something about a similar trick for interrupt-
driven state machines
that is too horrible to go into. This is what I was referring to. I never thought it was an adequate general-
purpose coroutine implementation because it’s not easy to have multiple simultaneous activations of a
coroutine and it’s not possible using this method to have coroutines give up control anywhere but in their
top-level routine. A simple assembly-language stack-switching library lets you do both of those.

Simon Tatham says:

3/7/2005 at 4:38 pm

Aha, I suspected as much. I’ve updated the page to upgrade my suspicion to a certainty.

On the occasions when I need a sub-coroutine (or is it a co-subroutine?) to give up control, I generally do
it by fiddling with the semantics of the subroutine’s return value and having the subroutine call look
something like “while (subroutine(ctx, params) == NOT_FINISHED_YET) return NOT_FINISHED_YET;”, so
that the internal stack structure of the entire co-thread is torn down and rebuilt on each invocation.

I agree it’s not nearly as efficient as doing a proper stack switch in assembly language, but on the other
hand it beats having to write the stack switcher separately for every different platform and compiler on
which I plan to run my code. Porting is more than enough hassle as it is…

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