Subj : Re: RCU+SMR To : comp.programming.threads From : David Hopwood Date : Mon Jul 11 2005 09:23 pm Joe Seigh wrote: > David Hopwood wrote: >> Randy Howard wrote: >> >>> True. I've yet to hear of any commercial or popular OSS application >>> bragging about the massive performance benefits achieved through the >>> use of lock-free techniques. >> >> I very much doubt that there is enough benefit from using lock-free >> techniques in *applications* to justify the complexity cost, and the >> effort required to learn how to use them correctly. They belong in >> operating systems and language implementations, where these costs are >> amortized over many apps. >> > Depends on the api and usage patterns that you create for the lock-free > stuff. I don't think it does, really. Note that I was talking about using lock-free techniques directly in applications; not using "infrastructure" libraries that happen to be implemented using lock-free stuff, but that do not expose it to their clients. My argument is that lock-free primitives are inherently too complex and error-prone to be exposed directly for general-purpose application programming, no matter how well-designed the API. > Some people believe threading is too difficult to use and > should not be used by applications. Some have gone a far to say that > they would fire any of their employees that used multi-threading. I've > even seen that in job ads, that the candidate should know how to not > use threading. Concurrency is essential; threading isn't. -- David Hopwood .