[Lazarus] Threads

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Lukasz Sokol wrote:
> On 23/03/2012 16:10, Michael Schnell wrote:
>> BTW.: Do you know this ?
>>
>> www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.pdf
>>
>> -Michael O:-)
>>
> 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.

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.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]