\begin{Ken Foskey} > Mikolaj J. Habryn wrote: > > > > 1) If you think your program requires multithreading, 99% of the time, > >you're wrong. > > 2) If you /still/ think your program requires multithreading, see point 1. > > > Rubbish, threading is needed in a lot of applications. For example > web servers or even web query utilities so that they can download > concurrent parts of the page.
hmm.. of the browsers i currently have installed, links, w3, netscape and mozilla do that funky "render while downloading" and support background downloading of files. links does not link against libpthread, and is (i believe) based on the lynx code, so afaics it doesn't use threads. w3 is written in elisp and runs within emacs. emacs does not support threaded elisp macros, hence w3 certainly does not use threads. netscape is not linked to libpthread, nor do i see extra process table entries when running netscape. its possible that netscape uses a user-space threading emulation (i wouldn't put it past it), but from what i've seen of netscape behaviour, i don't believe thats so. mozilla links against libpthread. a quick look at the process table when running it strongly implies its using threads. so: 1 out of the 4 "sophisticated" web browsers i have installed uses threads. this means that threads are certainly not necessary, and the decision is probably based on something else. -- - Gus -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug