RE: John Ousterhout on threads vs events.

Joe Barrera (joebar@microsoft.com)
Fri, 24 Apr 1998 16:32:15 -0700


> While looking for his paper on why threads are a bad idea for most
> programming (whereas instead events are a more easily understood
> paradigm):

> <http://www.scriptics.com/people/john.ousterhout/threads.ppt>
http://www.scriptics.com/people/john.ousterhout/threads.ppt

Threads and events are not mutually exclusive. I'm a strong believer in
event-driven programming, but there are times where life is just a lot
simpler when you have two or three threads to play with instead of forcing
everything into one thread. I am definitely NOT of the religion that events
should always be waited for separately, one thread per event.

Mike is, or at least used to be, more thread-happy than me, which is why
I've cc'd him on this message. Thus he could probably argue more
convincingly why Ousterhout is dead wrong. And then I threw Rich on the cc:
list for the heck of it.

At any rate, your homework assignment for tomorrow is to understand and
explain the various COM threading models -- single threaded, multi-threaded,
and mixed. You can start with
<http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q150/7/77.asp>
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q150/7/77.asp. It all seems
overly complicated, but I haven't wanted to investigate too deeply because
I've been afraid of finding out that all that complexity was actually
justified...

- Joe

Joseph S. Barrera III <joebar@acm.org>
<http://research.microsoft.com/~joebar/>
Phone, Office: (415) 778-8227; Cellular: (415) 601-3719; Home: (650)
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The opinions expressed in this message are my own personal views and do not
reflect the official views of Microsoft Corporation.