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It is gratuitous to take the word "simpler" as some kind of proof that the person you are responding to is an ignorant who uses objectively bad tools. Reality i

It is gratuitous to take the word "simpler" as some kind of proof that the person you are responding to is an ignorant who uses objectively bad tools. Reality is less clear. "Simpler" clearly referred to the complexity and the mess created by synchronization in a shared-everything environment, which is where most languages are at with threading (Haskell, Clojure and Erlang are not most languages). This is a valid criticism. You may lose Copy-on-Write, but sharing everything by default, at a low level, does raise the need for complex synchronization, which has its own performance issues. And this is very good reason to explore and use other concurrency models. This is something that you and the article and the person you are responding to all seem to agree on. Except that you seem to take any interesting concurrency interface to be threading (no, goroutines are NOT threads) and you draw the strange moral that only the complex problems of threads can be addressed with nice tools and new ideas, but somehow not the problems of other basic concurrency models. Assuming we have available helpful interfaces for using processes, threads and greenlets - all of which have been produced somewhere - the argument should be about the performance of the foolproofed backends. Preferably based on numbers.

KirinDave 14y ago
> It is gratuitous to take the word "simpler" as some kind of proof that the person you are responding to is an ignorant who uses objectively bad tools. Given that you subsequently make the point that most toolkits are bad, I think my assumption was safe. But let's not lose the plot here, process-level parallelism makes sense in many cases. It's just not a valid replacement for per-process concurrency and it is most definitely not "simpler." Your failure modes become incredibly complex and varied, and that was my only point here. More modern environments–the ones you should be using unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise–use shared-state concurrency as a platform for higher level abstractions. But this is still "multicore in-process parallelism" and the underlying model is still threading. Building abstractions on top of in-process parallelism is not rejecting the underlying layer, it's embracing it. If you are not using modern tools, then yeah correct concurrency is hard and variable degrees of underlying parallelism only exacerbate that. It is also hard to start fires with just flint, steel and tinder. New topic, please. So I'm not sure what you're taking exception to other than your perception of my tone.

KirinDave 14y ago

> It is gratuitous to take the word "simpler" as some kind of proof that the person you are responding to is an ignorant who uses objectively bad tools. Given that you subsequently make the point that most toolkits are bad, I think my assumption was safe. But let's not lose the plot here, process-level parallelism makes sense in many cases. It's just not a valid replacement for per-process concurrency and it is most definitely not "simpler." Your failure modes become incredibly complex and varied, and that was my only point here. More modern environments–the ones you should be using unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise–use shared-state concurrency as a platform for higher level abstractions. But this is still "multicore in-process parallelism" and the underlying model is still threading. Building abstractions on top of in-process parallelism is not rejecting the underlying layer, it's embracing it. If you are not using modern tools, then yeah correct concurrency is hard and variable degrees of underlying parallelism only exacerbate that. It is also hard to start fires with just flint, steel and tinder. New topic, please. So I'm not sure what you're taking exception to other than your perception of my tone.