Re: Hokay, I officially give up...

Perhaps now is the time to look as Scala and see if its actor implementation
helps.
I haven't tried this myself since I find it hard to justify the time to try
something new when what I have already works but ... I have this nagging
feeling that all that explicit locking and synchronized keywords stuff will
come back to haunt me and bite me in the behind when I can least afford it.

I need to spend time on this but I cannot justify it. This sort of stuff is
destined to drive us all mad.

Regards,

Gordon J Milne

2009/5/22 John Carter <[email protected]>

> I have sort it with needles, I have sort it with care, I have pursued
> it with forks and hope...
>
> ... 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.
>
> Threading in an interpreter is intrusive and incredibly subtle,
> putting hooks into every corner. Maybe one day they will get it
> perfect... but I doubt it.
>
> In fact, the next generation of ruby uses pthreads.... which leaves me
> with a feeling of cold dread. Why? Because last year I wasted more
> time than I care to account for tracking a race in a the glibc pthread
> library routines.
>
> Threading is very easy to do, easy to get 99.9% right, but incredibly
> hard to get 100% robust. You can get it 99.9% right, or 99.99% right or
> even 99.999% right... but right always and in every case seems to be
> incredibly hard. Not just for me apparently, but for OS, library and
> interpreter writers as well.
>
> And alas, unless _everybody_ gets it perfect, the end result is still
> flawed... and as we get more and more cores on the CPU, the problems
> are just going to get bigger.
>
> I'm giving up on them and ripping out the word Thread from my entire
> app.
>
> Alas, threads still exist as cruft within in the OS, libraries and
> interpreters making them all much bigger, much more complex and a lot
> buggier.
>
> 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)....
>
> I'm just plain not smart enough to do threads.
>
> John Carter                             Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
> Tait Electronics                        Fax   : (64)(3) 359 4632
> PO Box 1645 Christchurch                Email : [email protected]
> New Zealand
>
>
>
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