By deterministic, I am referring to their scheduling. Here's an example in Rust:
use std::thread;
use std::sync::mpsc::channel;
fn main() {
let thread_count = 4;
let (tx, rx) = channel();
for x in 0..thread_count {
let tx = tx.clone();
thread::spawn(move || {
println!("t{} tx", x);
tx.send(x).unwrap();
});
}
for _ in 0..thread_count {
println!("rx from t{}", rx.recv().unwrap());
}
}
What I'm doing there is create 4 child threads, from which I send messages that are to be captured by the main thread.
I built and ran it with:
rustc --opt-level 0 main.rs && ./main
Following is output from one sample run:
t1 tx
t0 tx
t2 tx
t3 tx
rx from t1
rx from t0
rx from t3
rx from t2
Following is what I get with another run:
t0 tx
t1 tx
rx from t1
t2 tx
rx from t2
t3 tx
rx from t3
rx from t0
If it was all deterministic (i.e. predictable), t0 tx would always
come before t1 tx, and rx from t0 before rx from t1, and so on.
I think this is done for performance reasons, where the kernel just looks for an available slot, running each thread on a best-effort basis. My guess is that a more real-time kernel would be more predictable.