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

No threads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright, then all responses to this article need to fall under this one post.

How about "C++ threads considered harmful"?

[krog]

Because really, multithreading doesn't have to be hard

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 disagree with both this guy AND Dijkstra

[halivar]

Goto's and global variables are not inherently wrong or evil. They are tools. Granted, they are tools that, if misused, will wreak havoc on your code's stability and maintainability. The same could be said, however, for pointers. Threads are dangerous, and require special care. This is not a reason to avoid them; it is only a reason to be incredibly careful with them.

Use the best tool for the job, regardless of whether your CS professors demonized it or not.

Not really news

[AKAImBatman]

Threads have been considered a "bad idea" by the CompSci profession for a little while now. So there is definitely nothing new about the author's statements. That being said, there is a fundamental difference between Dijkstra's paper 40 years ago and this summary: Dijkstra started his paper by holding up examples of better practices. Only after establishing their existence did he go on to suggest that the GOTO keyword was "too primitive" to be of practical use in software development.

The author of this "article" (and I use the term loosely) doesn't really present such options. He hand waves a few work-in-progress solutions at the end, compares threads to GOTO statements, then asks the readers to fill in the (rather sizable) blanks.

Long story short, it's a good topic of discussion, but the comparison to Dijkstra's famous paper is just an advertising point. Nothing more, nothing less.

That's not disagreeing with Dijkstra

[Anonymous Coward]

I know nobody born in the last 30 years has bothered to read his memo, but he doesn't pretend gotos are "evil". Just that people should adopt structured control flow structures instead. Meaning, design and use languages with such advanced features as "if/else" statements, and "while" loops, and "functions". Goto considered harmful was written in a time when most people were not using the fancy new languages that offered these features, and he was suggesting that they do so, in order to improve the quality of their code.

Unless you seriously think people should use gotos instead of loops and if/else statements, then you don't disagree with Dijkstra.

Fancy programming languages are NOT the solution.

[ulatekh]

I'm tired of reading replies to this article that evangelize some fancy-schmancy high-level solution. I wonder if these advocates have ever tried writing production code in such an environment.

Let me give you a wonderful example of when theory simply doesn't meet reality.

Recently, I wrote a bunch of multi-threaded code for a next-generation asymmetric-multiprocessing game console that shall remain nameless. Its operating system has a wonderful complement of synchronization features. There's the usual mutex lock/unlock, and the usual condition signal/wait, but there are also event queues (queues of generic events that can be passed between threads running on different types of processors), lightweight mutexes/conditions, spinlocks, semaphores, reader/writer locks, and so on and so on. Truly a rich palette from which one can paint a wonderfully synchronized multi-threaded application! I then proceeded to try to rewrite a key section of our code in a very multi-threaded way.

The problem was, the first version of this code added NINETY milliseconds per frame to our main thread. A profile showed that nearly all of the extra time was spent in the operating system's synchronization features.

After much rewriting and much pain, I stopped using all of the operating system's synchronization features, and used processor-level atomic operations instead, and finally, the extra code accounted for only FOUR milliseconds per frame in our main thread (with the rest of the time successfully farmed out to separate threads).

I challenge anyone with a fancy-schmancy automatic concurrency solution to demonstrate that it doesn't have this problem.