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Thanks for the advice on dogmatism coupled with the statement about having a worthless OS since 1990. > In the context of the OS, multithreading (or something

Thanks for the advice on dogmatism coupled with the statement about having a worthless OS since 1990. > In the context of the OS, multithreading (or something essentially equivalent) is the only way to exploit the abilities of "modern" machines. I noticed that you qualified multithreading with "or something essentially equivalent". I guess you would agree that qualifying it this way is a good idea. Mr Blandy did not care to do that though: "[...] is the only way to exploit the abilities of modern machines." I don't like that because it sounds like he's trying to popularize one approach to concurrency without even acknowledging that it is just one approach.

kibwen 11y ago
It's important to mention here that Rust's approach to multithreading changes the rules of the game. Multithreading has rightfully earned its popular ire over the past few decades, but once you have a typesystem that prevents data races it's almost like there's an entirely new paradigm at your fingertips. So if Rust folk seem insistent on mentioning the use of threads, it's not because they want to push some agenda, it's because they want to overcome the suddenly-obsolete stigma against multithreading. Note as well that Rust intends to have world-class support for a wide variety of approaches to concurrency and parallelism. Threading and channels are already in the stdlib, and fork/join and SIMD are in the works now. The goal is to enable the programmer to be able to choose the best tool for the job.
deleted 11y ago
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