:>
:> Huh? Aside from the issues of portability why not use it? You don't have
:> to worry about allocating a buffer for gethostbyname_r() and worry about
:> it being big enough, etc... If gethostbyname() works, run with it! :)
:>
:
:At least some of us think that portability is a big deal...
:
Please excuse the rant that's about to happen...threads on Linux happen to
be my sore spot. :)
<rant mode=on>
Actually, I happen to think that portability _is_ a big deal since what I
do for a living is write multithreaded programs that have to run on
Solaris, Digital Unix and even NT from the same source tree. This is why
I get on so many Linux people's back about the state of MT under Linux.
Most "big" unixish applications ( ie Oracle, Netscape's web servers ) are
multi-threaded, through-and-through and really benifit from it.
There are a lot of applications and tools that my company writes that I
would love to port over to Linux but when I have problems, I'm toast. gdb
can attach to one thread at a time. This gets to be kind of tedious when
you have a dozen threads running. Also, any post-mortem debugging is
apparently impossible. Because of this it isn't exactly the most
appealing applications development platform. There are a couple of
patches floating around that help with these problems but they should
really be applied to the kernel as a whole. If you want to distribute
software and support it you don't want to tell your customer that they
have to patch their kernel to help you fix your application.
People say that to make Linux a general success, it needs applications.
Well, this is one huge area where Linux is really behind the big boys.
glibc is a really big step towards making this happen, but I don't see the
kernel people tuned to this problem which is where a lot of things need to
happen. CLONE_PID isn't there and I can't imagine what has to happen to
make that a reality. Then there's integrating pthreads to use it. I've
seen some off-handed comments from a couple of people but no solid
statements like "This will be available in 2.2 or 2.4". Also, there's the
changes to gdb that have to happen as well.
If people want applications to run on Linux, then they have to make an
exnvironment that application programmers will want to work in, even love
to work in. Right now, if you want to do threads, you're basically up the
creek. They are very usable, but there are some pretty big holes.
If I had the skills, I would make the time and do it myself. I'm not just
saying that. Unfortunately, I don't. I can just sit on the sidelines and
boo and whine about it. :)
I absolutely love Linux and hate to see applications people discount it
because of this one problem. I've seen it happen.
</rant>
--Chris
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Christopher Blizzard
AppliedTheory Communications, Inc.
http://odin.appliedtheory.com/
blizzard@appliedtheory.com
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