Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 13 Jul 1999 05:43:55 +0000 | From | Steve Underwood <> | Subject | Re: AMIGA will use Linux, but Linux has several "multimedia-deficiencies" |
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Hi Marty,
Marty Leisner wrote:
> John Osterhout gave a good presentation at Usenix several years ago > about "why threads aren't always good" (or something like that). > You can find it on his web site (I think). It agrees with my thinking. > > It seems much of the argument of "lets use C++" is the same as > "lets use threads". Sometimes it is the right answer, very often > it is the wrong answer. > > One of the problems with threads, if it shared data gets corrupted, > it is very, very difficult to analyze and debug...and it appears > to be random in many cases... > > I've spent enough time debugging other peoples threads problems, the first > question I ask is "why are you using threads?" Very seldom do I get a > good answer to this question. > > Marty Leisner
The John Osterhout presentation is a very sane and balanced assessment of the value of select based programming versus threads - recommended reading. I had a similar presentation of my own once, but his is better so I threw mine away. The only issue he doesn't adequately address is the scalability limitation of select in multi-CPU environments. I guess it was written some time ago, when multi-CPU systems were less significant. Perhaps he should update it to give a properly balanced view for 1999's systems.
Steve
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