On Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:13:22 EDT, Dean Anderson said:
I'm reminded of the arguments in the late 80's about threading: People (like you) said there are no multithreading operating systems, and multiprocessor systems existed only in labs. So designing threadsafe libraries or writing multithreading capable languages was a total waste of time. And they showed as evidence all the programs written from 1975 to 1985.
Odd, seeing how IBM's OS/360 supported multithreading in the mid-60s (well, OK, only the MVT variant did it really well - MFT had some restrictions, and PCP was basically a program loader on steroids), as did Multics, early Unix, the various PDP-8/11 and DEC-10/20 operating systems, and most supported multiprocessor systems before 1970. What you're actually talking about is the "I don't have to worry about *THAT*" syndrome that's always been the bane of program portability. Those of us who were around at the time remember all too well "Not all the world's a VAX" when programs that ran fine under BSD on a VAX would bomb out under SunOS 3.2 - because the VAX allowed dereferencing a NULL pointer and SunOS didn't. And anyhow, you're looking at it totally backwards - things like system libraries didn't support multithreading well at first because nobody was *interested* in doing it. The support did happen once there was an actual demand for it. Remember that there's a *cost* to supporting multithreading - you have to drag along all this ugly locking code and stuff like that. It's really hard to justify putting in code that slows down the 95% of the applications that are single-threaded for the 5% that are multi-threaded, and even harder to justify putting the support in the library "just in case somebody wants to use it in the future".
Well, PPLB isn't the end of the world. But PPLB is coming, and the smart people will be prepared for it. They dumb people, well, they're dumb. What can be expected from dumb people?
What you seem to be missing is that the *really* smart people will be prepared for it when it actually gets here - and will take advantage of it's lack of arrival in the meantime.