Re: [Chicken-users] critical-section not in Chicken 3?

[Tobia Conforto]

Elf wrote:
> fwiw, threads are not always avoidable
> ...
> it would not be possible to have equivalent functionality without  
> threading, nor would the performance requirements be attainable  
> without threads.

"A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can't  
program state machines." (Alan Cox)

A bold statement, but I kind of agree.  Except maybe for when you seek  
to simulate many random, unpredictable, asynchronous processes,  
threads are just a quick hack.  A hand-crafted, event-based solution  
is usually more efficient, easier to get right and much easier to debug.

If you lack the needed OS primitives (select, non-blocking I/O, etc.)  
or if you need to cope with a bad OS, then threads might be the only  
way to go, but those are cases that call for ugly hacks anyway.

What is it you couldn't do in the raw-sockets egg without threads?


Tobia