03/01/04 23:20:17, Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[Dan getting cranky snipped]
And that was that! Sorry I spoke.
I'm not trying to shut anyone down. What I wanted to do was stop folks diving down too low a level. Yes, we could roll our own mutexes, condition variables, and semaphores, but we're not going to; it's far too system--not just architecture or OS specific, but system setup specific. Single-processor systems want to context switch on mutex aquisition failures, SMP systems want to use adaptive spinlocks, atomic test-and-set operations aren't necessarily on some NUMA systems, and ordering operations are somewhat fuzzy on some of the more advanced processors--and that's all on x86 systems.
All this stuff is best left to the OS, which presumably has a better idea of what the right and most efficient thing to do is, and certainly has more resources behind it than we do. Definitely is in a position to be up-to-date, in ways that we don't have. (You can guarantee that the OS on a system is sufficiently up-to-date to run properly, but it's not the same with user executables, which can be years old)
I really don't want folks to get distracted by trying to get down to the metal--it'll just get folks all worked up over something we're not going to be doing because it's not prudent. I'd prefer everyone get worked up over the higher-level stuff and just assume we have the simple stuff at hand, and as the simple stuff is all we can safely assume that's just a prudent thing.
(This is one of those cases where I'd really prefer for force everyone doing thread work to have to work on 8 processor Alpha boxes (your choice of OS, I don't care), one of the most vicious threading enviroments ever devised, but alas that's not going to happen. Pity, though)
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
