On 2/17/08, Marc Balmer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Geoff Steckel wrote: > > > Threads or any other form of uncontrolled resource sharing > > are very bad ideas. > > that might be true for those that don't understand threads. > for other it can be highly benefitial.
Indeed, "threads are bad" strikes me as just plain silly. In fact, it's not even a technical issue; anybody who thinks it is is in for a rude surprise (like, zero market share) in a few short years. It's a purely economic issue. It won't be long before all machines are multicore, multiprocessor (can one even buy a non-multicore pc any more?) and maybe even network-distributed. You invest x dollars in a y processor machine; your IT guy says "I've got this really great software that's really secure, since it's single-threaded. And it's free." To which you respond "so, I just spent all this money on y processors and you want me to leave y-1 of them idle? So it's not really free after all. Security? That would be great, if I had any customers, which I don't since the other guy's stuff is z times faster than yours, and it leverages his entire hardware investment. You're fired." It won't happen overnight, but happen it will, since the business decision is so blatantly obvious (you don't buy factories in order to have them sit idle.) The thing to do is not to forbid multi-threading, but to do it right. That might involve designing new languages or any number of other things, but "we're not going to do multi-threading because it's risky" is the fast road to obsolescence and irrelevance. my .02 -gregg
