Re: Hokay, I officially give up...

On Fri, 22 May 2009, John Carter wrote:

> ... I have found bugs, in my code and fixed'em. I have found bugs in
> ruby, and fixed them. But there are more and I can't see the bottom of
> the pool. Each time I thought, "AH! I have FOUND IT!", but I have
> merely decreased the probability of occurrence. Each time I think, if
> I just get this right, it's going to be a small contained no-risk
> tweak to my app... it's worth ploughing on.
> Threading is a truly awful paradigm and I truly regret ever having
> anything to do with it.

Lucky you, you had a real reason. I was finding no bugs in my code, I was 
finding no bugs in Ruby's code, and it was crashing randomly all of the 
time, but I wasn't even using any threads! So, I just removed all that 
used <ruby.h> and rewrote half of it in C++ and half of it in Pd. End of 
the story. RIP the Ruby plugin for Pd. But that was a long time ago.

The Ruby GC introduces perhaps as much weirdness as threads do. Ok, 
perhaps not as much, but it was just too much for me.

> I'm giving up on them and ripping out the word Thread from my entire
> app.

I've learned quite early to confine threads as much as possible, to limit 
the complexity. In practice I've almost never used them, but I expect to 
use them once in a while.

> Sorry, it is time to admit Moore's Law has just crashed into the
> immovable barrier of Grunt's Law (Human aren't getting smarter)....

Could we just stop talking about Moore's law for anything else than the 
number of transistors in a CPU ?

Though the increase of complexity of software is boosted by the increase 
of the number of transistors, if the number of transistors stopped to 
increase, we'd still see an increase in the complexity of software for 
more than quite a while.

  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec