Re: [patch 00/13] Syslets, "Threadlets", generic AIO support, v3

Theodore Tso
2007-02-27T11:53:21Z

On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 01:28:32PM +0300, Evgeniy Polyakov wrote:
> Obviously there are bugs, it is simply how things work.
> And debugging state machine code has exactly the same complexity as
> debugging multi-threading code - if not less...

Evgeniy,

I think what you are not hearing, and what everyone else is saying
(INCLUDING Linus), is that for most programmers, state machines are
much, much harder to program, understand, and debug compared to
multi-threaded code. You may disagree (were you a MacOS 9 programmer
in another life?), and it may not even be true for you if you happen
to be one of those folks more at home with Scheme continuations, for
example. But it is true that for most kernel programmers, threaded
programming is much easier to understand, and we need to engineer the
kernel for what will be maintainable for the majority of the kernel
development community.

Regards,

- Ted