Calling Prolog Asynchronously

If you wish to call Prolog back from a signal handler or a thread other than the thread that called SP_initialize, that is, the main thread, you cannot use SP_query() etc. directly. The call to Prolog has to be delayed until such time that the Prolog execution can accept an interrupt and the call has to be performed from the main thread (the Prolog execution thread). The function SP_event() serves this purpose, and installs the function func to be called from Prolog (in the main thread) when the execution can accept a callback. It returns non-zero if and only if installation succeeded. func is called with arg as first argument.

A queue of functions, with corresponding arguments, is maintained; that is, if several calls to SP_event() occur before Prolog can accept an interrupt, the functions are queued and executed in turn at the next possible opportunity. A func installed with SP_event() will not be called until SICStus is actually running. One way of ensuring that all pending functions installed with SP_event() are run is to call, from the main thread, some dummy goal, such as, SP_query_cut_fail(SP_predicate("true",0,"user")).

While SP_event() is safe to call from any thread, it is not safe to call from arbitrary signal handlers. If you want to call SP_event() when a signal is delivered, you need to install your signal handler with SP_signal() (see below).

Note that SP_event() is one of the very few functions in the SICStus API that can safely be called from another thread than the main thread.

Depending on the value returned from func, the interrupted Prolog execution will just continue (SP_SUCCESS) or backtrack (SP_FAILURE or SP_ERROR). An exception raised by func, using SP_raise_exception, will be processed in the interrupted Prolog execution. If func calls SP_fail or SP_raise_exception the return value from func is ignored and handled as if func returned SP_FAILURE or SP_ERROR, respectively. In case of failure or exception, the event queue is flushed.

It is generally not robust to let func raise an exception or fail. The reason is that not all Prolog code is written such that it gracefully handles being interrupted. If you want to interrupt some long-running Prolog code, it is better to let your code test a flag in some part of your code that is executed repeatedly.

     int SP_event(int (*func)(void*), void *arg)
     

• Signal Handling: