Threads Considered Harmful

LBR9 writes "James Reinders compares native threads with the goto statement so famously denounced 40 years ago by Edsger Dijkstra. Paraphrasing Dijkstra, he says they both 'make a mess of a program,' and then argues in favor of a higher level of abstraction. A couple of people commenting on the post question whether or not we should be even be treading into the 'swamp of parallelism,' echoing the view recently espoused by Donald Knuth."

Comments

Not exactly a new sentiment

[Dr. Manhattan]

See here: Threads are a fertile source of bugs because they can too easily know too much about each others' internal states. There is no automatic encapsulation, as there would be between processes with separate address spaces that must do explicit IPC to communicate. Thus, threaded programs suffer from not just ordinary contention problems, but from entire new categories of timing-dependent bugs that are excruciatingly difficult to even reproduce, let alone fix.

I use threads a fair amount, because they are there. But I kinda wish path expressions would catch on. Let the compiler sort out the scheduling given the constraints - that's the kind of scut work computers are good for anyway.

I'm All For Getting Rid Of Threads, But...

[rsmith-mac]

I'm all for getting rid of threads, but what are you going to replace them with? Traditional functional languages may be the most obvious solution, but they're also among the most impractical of solutions. Is there anything else out there that can replace threading needs, without throwing out the book on programming? It seems like what we need hasn't been invented yet.

Web server w/o processes OR threads...

[Dr. Manhattan]

Unix's select/poll mechanism avoids all that. See, e.g., here.