[LCP]design issues

[David Spencer]

I would beg to differ...

If your program needs to do several things at the same time, and you 
don't use threads, then you either have to do them serially, or you have 
to find some way of incrementally performing the tasks, then doing a bit 
of each one in a loop, which is what the OS does for you anyway with 
threads.  Using threads is a lot easier than writing all this manually, 
believe me, I know; when I started Windows programming threads didn't 
exist and you had to turn everything inside out so that it would work 
together.  Threads make all this much easier, much nicer, and 
consequently much easier to debug.  Manually splitting stuff out so that 
you don't have to use threads is seriously butt fugly, even more so than Mo.

If your program doesn't need to do several things at once, then of 
course threads are a waste of space.

Performing tasks incrementally in a loop also gives you zero performance 
enhancement when you upgrade to a multiprocessing machine.  With threads 
you get an instant improvement for free because the OS just gives 
different threads to different processors.

Dave.


Greg Black wrote:

>On 2003-09-02, devraj  sanyal wrote:
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>>For multi threaded systems this can be done easily [...]
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>You're dreaming -- *nothing* can be done easily with threads;
>and most things can't be done successfully, if the standard of
>current threaded software is any guide.
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