[Lazarus] Threads
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk
Mon Mar 26 13:24:01 CEST 2012
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]
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