On Fri, March 30, 2007 9:23 pm, Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > Lan Barnes wrote: >> I have assumed that there _are_ problems that must be solved with >> threads > > I'm not convinced. > > There are problems that *should* be solved with concurrency. > > There are, however, many different models for concurrency. Threads seem > to be a particularly poor one. However, the thread abstraction seemed > to map onto Unix much more readily than anything else. > > Microkernels, for example, are more amenable to the Actors/message > passing model. However, they initially performed very poorly when > emulating Unix API's. Recently, however, they seem to be competitive.
Do you include QNX? Because they've had a working, bitching microkernel Posix OS for years. Proprietary, of course. > > Concurrency is the Achilles' heel of almost all of the current crop of > languages. I don't think Tcl, Python, Perl, or Ruby are going to > survive that weakness. > Do you say this from a position of having tested all those languages and their threading? Or is this a guesstimate? I've held my tongue because I don't personally delve into the depths of any language feature until I have a need to, and I've never written anything that remotely called for threads[0]. I've embarrassed myself all too often by having strong opinions on things I was ignorant of. But I'm not ignorant of the Tcl core community. I've sat in their discussions (Tcl USA '05 in Portland) and followed the discussions on line. They are the most thoughtful, substantive, and courteous group I have ever sat on the sidelines with. Nothing is initiated that isn't discussed, accepted, and designed to the most stringent of standards. Threading is part of the Tcl core and has been for quite a while. I never use it. Actually, name spaces have been in tcl forever and I rarely use them. They just aren't necessary for the programs I write, so I don't bother. Why would I? The current project in the tcl core group is adding OO primitives to the core. OO extensions have been available in tcl forever ([incr tcl] and others), but Donal [sic] Fellows (I know he's in the UK; I vaguely remember Cambridge) is now adding low level OO tools in concurrence with the core team. I have never groked OO and this has less impact on my life then, oh, I donno, desktop fussion. [0] I have written lots of concurrent programs as well as a couple of async socket c/s programs. Tcl makes these absurdly easy. I haven't looked at tcl threading, but if it allows you to open a new interpreter in a different thread, even I could utilize it without losing my feeble mind. -- Lan Barnes SCM Analyst Linux Guy Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
