The documentation of libCom/osi/epicsEvent in the Developer's Guide
carefully avoids saying anything about what happens if an event gets
signalled and more than one thread waits for the event to happen.
The name "event" and most of what's written in the docs suggest that
*any* thread waiting for an event will be able to continue as soon as
the event gets signalled.
If this is true, how do I get the effect of a (binary) semaphore, i.e.
only one thread waiting on the semaphore will continue, the others have
to wait until the semaphore is given again?
Or, if it is false, i.e. epicsEvent really acts like a binary semaphore,
I suggest that this be more clearly stated in the docs. It should also
be stated how the library or system choses the thread to run; in
VxWorks, this can be influenced when creating the semaphore (FIFO or
priority based), but if other systems do not allow such a distinction
then it should be explicitly stated in the documentation that no
assumptions should be made about which thread is chosen. Note that this
severely complicates things if you want e.g. FIFO semantics, because
you'd have to implement all the queueing yourself.
Thanks
Ben