On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 04:41:39PM +0200, Momchil Velikov wrote: > Jimmy> I believe the poster was > Jimmy> offering it to Robert as a way to test his eventual port of a threads > Jimmy> library to glibc-on-BSD to see if it performs well and is thread-safe > Jimmy> for thread-intensive applications such as his. (To give you an idea of > Jimmy> this poster's standards, he stated that he considered all versions of > Jimmy> Linux prior to the existence of NPTL not to be thread-safe for his > Jimmy> purposes.) > > What's the point in demonstrating how fast can you do nothing ? Well, first of all, there probably are legitimate uses for it that neither of us has thought of, although I am willing to be told otherwise by someone who has looked into this. In that sense, it's probably not "nothing" to achieve fast and correct performance from the thread library in this regard. Yes, it has usefulness as an informal benchmark, or as part of a more rigorous formal benchmark. In any case, I hope I did indicate that I have less experience than many list posters with threads (although I hope to gain at least a bit more when I take an operating systems course at my uni as soon as next fall). If anything I said in the previous paragraph is rubbish, I'm quite willing to believe it. My point to Robert was primarily that most of the people making claims about threads were quite knowledgeable people, and if he was disagreeing with their easily-reached consensus, and voicing this disagreement on this list as forcefully as he was, he should have some concrete evidence (or else really good logic from premises that are agreed upon by everyone concerned) to back up his claims. If he doesn't do that, flamewars and hurt feelings ensue. Since I am not a threads expert, I personally tried not to make any claims about threads in my post to Robert beyond citing the statements of other posters who have demonstrated relevant knowledge or experience. - Jimmy Kaplowitz jimmy@debian.org
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