On 2008-Aug-8, at 16:30, Kon Lovett wrote:
My 2 cents.
The SRFI document is clear about the danger. The Chicken mail
archive is clear about the danger. "Standards & Practices" is clear
about the danger.
Who are we protecting?
Well, I spent several years teaching concurrency (along with many
other topics) at a large multinational company whose software
engineers overwhelmingly spoke C++, and the number of horrific
travesties they committed would sicken anyone. (A standard response to
race conditions was to insert a sleep call, for example. `Oh, you QA
folks are seeing crashes on your test machines? We can't reproduce
them on our development machines.')
We should keep in mind that the mailing list probably focuses on the
high end of Chicken users, and that many programmers don't necessarily
understand this stuff that well, even if they did take the obligatory
3rd year OS course where they used mutexes and condition variables.
My preference is the same as John Cowan's: kill it. If not, put
warnings in the manual. I don''t find SRFI-18's warning (in the
paragraph headed NOTE:) strong enough, as it uses the phrase `may be a
problem', not `is virtually guaranteed to be a problem'. Further, I
don't know what fraction of Chicken users actually go and read the
SRFIs.
So, I'd say, `we're protecting that large group of programmers whom we
would like to persuade that Chicken is a Good Thing'.
-- v
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