Re: Hokay, I officially give up...

On Fri, 22 May 2009, Brian Hurt wrote:

> On Fri, 22 May 2009, John Carter wrote:
>
>> Threading is a truly awful paradigm and I truly regret ever having
>> anything to do with it.
>
> Threading is definitely the challenge of this generation.

   >> Snipped much excellent stuff<<

I've just caught up with this thread again after a few days... I've
been away ripping the word Thread out of everything and replacing it
with "process".

The funny thing is I seem to be deleting more code than I'm writing
and it just feels so much cleaner and, well, better separated and
faster!  (Think of a process exit as an very very fast garbage
collector sweep)


> Unfortunately, I think that multithreading is inevitable.  The number of
> cores is going to continue doubling every ~2 years, for the forseeable
> future.  Not only do we need to handle 2-, 4-, and 8- core machines, in
> the not too distant future we'll need to handle 1024-core machines, or
> 16,384-core machines.
>
> I think there is hope- but it comes at a cost.  The cost is radically
> rethinking how we do programming.

True again. Concurrency is inevitable.

But I am certain now that multithreading IS not inevitable.

At most the answer will be "soft processes". ie. Those language whose
semantics are clean enough to create threads which have the same
properties as processes.

Concurrency is easier to do, very hard to get reliable. Concurrency is
hard, massive concurrency is very hard.

We are going to need all the hardware and tool support we can get.


John Carter                             Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics                        Fax   : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch                Email : [email protected]
New Zealand