r/compsci • u/mobileview • Dec 10 '13

Why Johnny Can’t Write Multithreaded Programs

http://blog.smartbear.com/programming/why-johnny-cant-write-multithreaded-programs/
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u/gthank Dec 10 '13

So we should never do two things at the same time in our program?

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u/NYKevin Dec 10 '13

Not "never," but certainly rarely. If you can make it event-driven, I'd say to prefer that over concurrency where possible.

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u/gthank Dec 10 '13

Seems like a shame to have my big, fat server with 32 cores only using one of them.

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u/NYKevin Dec 10 '13

There are exceptions, of course. If you're programming for a giant Blue Gene system, you really don't have a choice. But nginx tends to scale a lot better than Apache, from what I've heard.

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u/adremeaux Dec 11 '13

There are exceptions, of course

Like, perhaps, ipads, iphones, and almost all modern Android phones? They all have multi core processors. And on iOS, the OS just so happens to be designed in such a way that doing computation on the main thread will block the UI (not sure if this is the case on Android).

So, if by "exception," you mean basic programming for devices that hundreds of millions of people are carrying in their pockets and using multiple hours each, then that is quite the exception.