3 ms·

Locks require enough of a performance hit on enough architectures that it’s better to document the dictionary as _not_ being threadsafe and require external syn

• mananaysiempre 4y ago
  And yet most stdio implementations on systems capable of multithreading add locking around every operation (with the notable exception of Microsoft’s single-threaded C runtime when it still existed, as well as a handful of distinct *_unlocked functions on Unix that were added specifically to mitigate this problem). There are probably multiple reasons for this, including historical precedent and the need for misuse resistance in a language’s standard library, but I’d guess that in part this is simply because locks used to be much cheaper, especially before systems with multiple hardware threads became ubiquitous.
  • citizen_friend 4y ago
    I would include malloc in that list of regrets (or at least not having a lock free alternative). I think historically it wasn't clear what role threads would take. If you look at Java they expected application programmers to be using threads haphazardly. Now we know that isn't a good idea.