3 ms·
> 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
by 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.