I'd rather have real threads available in my language, and use shared state sparingly. Your N single-threaded processes have to talk to each other anyway, or a

I'd rather have real threads available in my language, and use shared state sparingly. Your N single-threaded processes have to talk to each other anyway, or at least to a master, and might even share memory through memory-mapping. Threads are just a tool, and they give you options. You can use them in a share-nothing way if you want. As someone who grew up on the Java VM and started my start-up/web career on it, I've always felt like Java programmers have a different relationship with threads than C programmers. Java gives you cross-platform, usable, debuggable native threads; it basically makes them free if you want them. In C/C++, on the other hand, threads are a library, and using them is a grungy affair. If you grew up on Rails, meanwhile, threads don't exist ("when you say worker thread, do you mean worker process? I'm confused"). Node.js was created by C programmers and launched with a lot of anti-thread propaganda, much like the link. They equated threads with shared state, and also said threads were too memory inefficient to be practical for a high-performance server (they meant that holding a native thread for every open connection would require too much stack space, which is true, but that's not what they said).