4 ms·
This was first published in 1978. We didn't have commoditized SMP machines until late 90s, early 2000s. Similarly, we didn't have 'good' threads until the earl
by eyberg 4y ago
This was first published in 1978.
We didn't have commoditized SMP machines until late 90s, early 2000s. Similarly, we didn't have 'good' threads until the early 2000s. In fact if you were coding in the 90s and early 00s you would've heard that threads were "bad", which was true at the time. Unfortunately, today you can still find this reiterated on places such as stack overflow even though it has long been untrue. We also deal with the fact that a lot of software made in the 90s has never been upgraded or replaced to deal with the architectural considerations of those days versus now. Today you can get up to 416 vCPUs on Google Cloud.
- Koshkin 4y ago> SMP It’s funny how more than a few programmers that I’ve talked to seemed to firmly associate threads (and processes) with the perceived need in multiple CPU cores to be able to run them. Preemptive multitasking on a single core simply did not look natural to them, to the point that some did not realize that it’s even possible. (One of them was also astonished to see, and to hear, a mechanical watch as he did not know such things existed.)
- morelisp 4y agoIf you only have one core threading remains an expensive abstraction both computationally and mentally. Without at least two cores there’s no reason to prefer threading to coroutines, select(2), state machine loops, etc.
- lesserknowndan 4y agoYes, but having threading is important if you can then run that code on a super computer to get the benefits - I’m talking about yesteryear when you’re own computer might have a single core Pentium II or something, but you could then run it on an SGI or other with a lot of parallelism.