Re: Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard

From: CBFalconer (cbfalconer_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 02/12/05 

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 03:01:03 GMT

Randy Howard wrote:
> cbfalconer@yahoo.com says...
>> Randy Howard wrote:
>>>
>> ... snip ...
>>>
>>> The next one that is going to start making the industry look
>>> foolish if parallel programming. Threads (or something better that
>>> gets dreamed up to replace them) will become the norm once
>>> multi-core CPU designs hit the mass market. When that happens, a
>>> host of new bugs will begin to appear, many of them with serious
>>> security implications, and teaching new college students to fix
>>> the bugs from 10 years ago won't help them prevent the new ones
>>> from appearing. Thread safety, race conditions, deadlock, cache
>>> blocking, priority inversion, locality of reference, etc. better
>>> start being part of the vocabulary of these students before they
>>> hit the real world, or it'll make buffer overruns look like a walk
>>> in the park.
>>
>> Are you claiming that CS types aren't taught these things? In the
>> past the complaint has been that the CS grads have too much OS
>> knowledge, and too little application knowledge.
>
> I think, as is typical in human nature, the reaction to the criticism
> has been overdone. We went from one of the spectrum to the other.
> Now they're all web developers, with no concept of talking to hardware
> at all.
>
>> The languages are generally designed to hide all that nasty stuff in
>> the OS.
>
> What if the job is to work on the OS itself? Write device drivers?

That's another matter and more amusing. But it is not the majority
of programming.

>
>> Thus we have pipes, feeding concurrently operating processes, and
>> nobody needs to know how it is done.
>
> I submit that by taking production threaded software that runs okay
> on a single processor, and moving it to an SMP box and seeing it
> deadlock, we can safely argue that your claim is lacking in accuracy.

The point is that each process runs a program, which _thinks_ it is
single threaded. No need to concern ourselves with threads, locks,
etc. This is where Unix and C mesh very well. 

-- 
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