Subj : Re: Lock Free -- where to start
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : Joe Seigh
Date : Thu Sep 29 2005 12:58 pm

David Hopwood wrote:
> Chris Thomasson wrote:
> 
[...]
> 
> 
> Right, but isn't this missing the point of David Schwartz's comments?
> 
> This newsgroup has had *many* threads with the following pattern:
> 
>  - someone asks how to solve a problem. Typically it's clear from this
>    post that the poster has relatively little experience with concurrent
>    programming in general.
> 
>  - one of the usual suspects suggests "using lock-free techniques".
> 
>  - the thread wanders off into esoterica about how to implement stuff at
>    a completely disjoint level of abstraction to the original question.

Then both you and David Schartz are missing the point.  The OP specifically
asked about lock-free.

> 
> 
> To some extent this is just par for the Usenet course; OTOH, this group
> does seem to have a particular collective obsession with lock-free at
> the moment. Some of us are concerned that newbies are getting, at best
> unfollowable, and sometimes just plain bad advice as a result.

People get bad advice in this newsgroup all the time.  Often from the
people who are allegedly concerned about people getting bad advice.
I've given up trying to correct these kind of things, e.g. telling
people mutexes have forward progress guarantees about visibility,
anything about observable behavior from cache (apart from performance),
etc...  The most blantant misinformation is that lock-free is too
complex to use when the typical way of dealing with complexity is to
encapsulate it with an easier to use api.  It's like saying that
programming with locks is too complex because most programmers would
have a hard time implementing a mutex correctly.


-- 
Joe Seigh

When you get lemons, you make lemonade.
When you get hardware, you make software.

.