Re: Threads

From: Bill Rutiser (wru_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-08-26 20:47:00

I wrote:

Let me add a warning about informal reasoning about concurrent 
processes. There exist clever, efficient, synchronization schemes, 
proved to be correct for two processes, that fail badly for three.  

Responses from Dave and Beman seemed to target the words 
"informal" and perhaps "proved". What I was really trying to 
suggest is that these are extremely tricky areas where it is easy to 
go wrong. Twenty years ago, I wrote, tested, proved, and was 
embarassed by an incorrect syncronization primitive. One 
important lesson I learned was "think about more than two 
processes".

My subsequent work has been in other areas so I am out of touch 
with current practice and art. However, I anticipate a need for 
thread facilities in the not too distant future and am grateful the 
work Boost is doing. 

-- Bill Rutiser