[Lazarus] Threads

[Lukasz Sokol]

On 26/03/2012 12:24, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:

>>> 
>> Cool especially the last sentence... " Threads must be relegated to
>> the engine room of computing, to be suffered only by expert
>> technology providers "
> 
> Equally significant, in my view, is the second sentence:
> 
> "Languages require little or no syntactic changes to support threads,
> and operating systems and architectures have evolved to efficiently
> support them."
> 
> followed by
> 
> "[Threads] discard the most essential and appealing properties of
> sequential computation: understandability, predictability, and
> determinism. Threads, as a model of computation, are wildly
> nondeterministic,"
> 
> In short, however he dresses up his argument with references to e.g.
> Occam, he's writing from the point of view of a computer scientist
> with no experience of embedded systems etc. where implementors are
> experienced in handling asynchronous and nested interrupts, and
> probably with no experience of Delphi and Lazarus which at the time
> of writing provided a fairly effective threading model.
> 
Should have put a :O emoticon after my 'cool' sentence...

> Allowing that this was written more than six years ago, it would be
> interesting to know whether he's modified his position now that POSIX
> threads are widely and reliably implemented.
> 
And multi-threaded and multi-cored cpu's available more than 6 years ago too.

(though truth be said, from looking at the lkml discussions, writing smp and rt aware
scheduler is by no means easy without compromising on any side of it...)

L.