After some time, I've finally got annoyed by the SBCL output race buglet to do something about it.

For those who haven't seen this (either because you don't use sbcl, or your systems aren't the "right" speed to trigger it), sometimes when outputting to the dedicated output stream, multiple flushes will be done to aren't the "right" speed to trigger it), sometimes when outputting to the dedicated output stream, multiple flushes will be done at the same time, resulting in something that looks like this paragraph.

I have a patch that fixes it, but it's a bit of a blunt instrument. It wraps the streams passed to MAKE-STREAM-INTERACTIVE in a Gray stream containing a mutex, so that the stream acts as a monitor, preventing different threads from using it at the same time. (This changes the semantics of the make-stream-interactive interface; before it was called for side-effects, now it may or may not have a side effect and returns an "interactive" stream that may or may not be the same object as the one it was called with. All the swank backends are updated in the patch.)

Currently, the patch is sbcl-only. While updating the other backends, I noticed abcl uses the same "thread which FORCE-OUTPUTs" technique, but I don't have abcl here, so I don't know if the same race manifests, if abcl even supports Gray strams, or how to create and use a mutex if the two previous conditions held.

Is there any interest in this, or does anyone have a better idea how to approach this bug?