Lan Barnes wrote: > While you guys have been using this thread to rhaposidize about that which > is new, shiny, hip slick and cool, I've been shaking my head and wondering > if you really missed my original point that completely: that maybe 98% of > the time, simple and direct is better than hip, slick and cool.
I don't believe we've missed that point. The great thing about threads is that they are complex and have all kinds of indirect impact that you don't see at first. ;-) Frankly, just using processes tends to result in cleaner and simpler code with fewer surprises. If you *aren't* going to use the process model for your concurrency, then you either use the afore mentioned "complex and indirect" metaphor, or you are delving in an area where people are *STILL* trying to figure out a "simple and direct" way to express things, and that's why people talk about new, shiny, hip, slick and cool stuff. > Tcl/Tk gives me all that. I hope I live a long, productive life without > ever having to write a line of threaded code, and with Tcl, I probably > have that option. Agreed, and that is fantastic. > Another thing. Someone (I forget who) made a sideways comment about the > "performance hit" that writing a program in Tcl entails. Umm ... how to > put this? ... bullpucky. A comment like that can only come from complete > inexperience (which is a kind way of saying ignorance). I was talking about the "performance hit" relative to the "performance hit" of using processes instead of threads. That isn't a lot of overhead, so this wasn't me taking a swipe at the language. However, I think I can safely argue that Tcl imposes similar, if not more overhead, to that imposed by using processes and as such trying to eek out a bit more performance by using threads instead is unlikely to be worth the considerable trouble. > People who sneer at the performance of modern scripting languages are, > IMO, repeating a slander that they have not personally tested. Believe me, I wasn't sneering. From my perspective, a scripting language is there to help you get things done quickly, and often the price for that is a small bit of runtime overhead. In that context, threads in a scripting language seems counter productive. --Chris -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
