Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 27 Aug 2000 20:27:59 -0700 (PDT) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: SCO: "thread creation is about a thousand times faster than on |
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On Sun, 27 Aug 2000 yodaiken@fsmlabs.com wrote: > > The beauty of POSIX 1003.13 for the RTLinux side is that we get to > define POSIX_SINGLE_PROCESS and forbid forbid fork and exec: making > threads semantics much cleaner.
Well, what you think of as a "beauty" I just consider a silly cop-out by the standard. Basically, a lot of things can call themselves "compliant to the letter of the law" wrt POSIX, while still leaving the _user_ out in the cold.
(This is not something new to POSIX .13, of course. It's just another way of saying "we've documented what people _do_, and not necessarily given people a standard way of actually doing things". Which I cannot argue with: it is, after all, how I think standards _should_ be written. I can only grumble about it when somebody then confuses "standard" and "design", and thinks that the two have anything in common).
What POSIX did right was to document existing implementation, and making people work at making things at least try to make it possible for the perfect programmer to take differences of implementation into account. Good and worthwhile goal.
What some people THINK that POSIX did is to design a sensible structure that everybody does and should adhere to. Which wasn't even the _charter_ of POSIX in the first place, of course. And which would never have worked out anyway (OSF tried it. May it rest in peace/rot in hell, depending on your viewpoint).
What _I_ want when it comes to threading is to have the "sensible structure" in place. I then, as a second-order interest, want to make it as straightforward and clean as possible (note the "as possible") to implement a pthreads layer on top of that, despite the fact that I don't particularly like the pthreads model (*).
Linus
(*) At this point, a big "Oh, REALLY?" is heard across the land. Duh.
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