> But threads weren't invented for shits and giggles, they were invented for good reasons!
I remain unconvinced ;-) It always seemed to me, that if threads were such a great idea, operating systems should expose threads, and not processes. In a way NT and Linux took different paths here - on Windows processes are expensive, on Linux threads and processes are pretty much the same in terms of overhead (but threads obviously allow sharing memory, for better or worse).
I've long suspected that if threads really could "be done right", they would've been preferred to processes. But just like people worked really hard to get hardware protected memory to be fast enough to be usable, I think working hard to get processes to be "fast enough" is more viable than "getting threads right". Amusingly, I suppose Erlang is actually an example of how mixing the two ideas can be a great idea: Don't let programmers know their "process" is a scheduled thread, force messaging over shared memory - and reap the benefit of light weight processes and strong(-ish) protection between threads...
I remain unconvinced ;-) It always seemed to me, that if threads were such a great idea, operating systems should expose threads, and not processes. In a way NT and Linux took different paths here - on Windows processes are expensive, on Linux threads and processes are pretty much the same in terms of overhead (but threads obviously allow sharing memory, for better or worse).
I've long suspected that if threads really could "be done right", they would've been preferred to processes. But just like people worked really hard to get hardware protected memory to be fast enough to be usable, I think working hard to get processes to be "fast enough" is more viable than "getting threads right". Amusingly, I suppose Erlang is actually an example of how mixing the two ideas can be a great idea: Don't let programmers know their "process" is a scheduled thread, force messaging over shared memory - and reap the benefit of light weight processes and strong(-ish) protection between threads...