> On Feb 14, 2017, at 4:46 PM, Richard Hipp <d...@sqlite.org> wrote: > > <rant> This is yet another reason why I say "threads are evil”.
I agree, and it’s a pretty widely held opinion these days, going back at least to Edward Lee’s 2006 paper “The Problem With Threads”.[1] Actually the problem isn’t threads per se, but sharing mutable data between threads. There is a lot of work these days going into alternative concurrency mechanisms that are safer to use. > Entire programming languages are invited (I'm thinking of > Java) to make goto and pointers impossible or to make assert() > impossible (Go) and yet at the same time encourage people to use > threads. Well, both Java and Go have pointers, including the dreaded null, just not pointer arithmetic or uninitialized pointers. And Go has had assertions for a while now. :) One of the bad things about Java is that it made threads so easy to use that they became an “attractive nuisance” in the hands of inexperienced or careless programmers. Go, to its credit, reintroduced the “channel” mechanism from CSP, a much safer way for threads to communicate. But channels are limited and somewhat slow, and Go still lets you mess with shared data and mutexes. The really interesting work is going on in new languages like Rust and Pony that make it impossible to share mutable state between threads. They let you express the idea of moving data, so one thread can hand off state to another without copying. —Jens [1]: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.pdf _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
