3 ms·

This is a completely pointless semantic distinction that nobody cares about. What makes threads interesting is parallelism; if the goal is merely cooperative o

• chrisseaton 12y ago
  If threads aren't interesting except for parallelism, what do you think people were using them for the multiple decades when the vast majority of people were running single-cored uniprocessor systems? The answer is that it's often useful to manage multiple things at the same time, even if we can't or don't want to actually do them at the same time. We may want to use blocking IO for the simplicity it gives us compared to asynchronous IO, but allow other parts of the system to continue to run during that blocking. We may want to let threads and the kernel manage our context and context switches for us, instead of manually storing and restoring state, because it can be simpler that way.
  • teacup50 12y ago
    > If threads aren't interesting except for parallelism, what do you think people were using them for the multiple decades when the vast majority of people were running single-cored uniprocessor systems? They largely weren't. POSIX threads weren't standardized and widely adopted until the 90s, and it wasn't until multi-processor systems became more prevalent that threads saw wide adoption at all.