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

Slowaris caused threading

[Russ Nelson]

Slowaris is behind threading. Because it was so slow to create new processes, the only way they could compete with Linux (which forks very quickly) was to create threading. Threading *is* faster than forking, but it also creates HUGE synchronization problems. You can overcome these problems, at the cost of more complicated, more fragile programs that take more time to write and more time to get right.

Linux doesn't need threading.