Monday, December 14, 2009

A Coroutine, Thread, and Semaphore Walk into a Bar...

This article about multicore programming techniques is pure comedic gold.

In particular, threads suffer badly from 'race conditions'. The race of despised worker threads is made to do boring, low status, 'background' tasks. Meanwhile, the high privilege 'system' threads get to party with the hardware. It's the same the whole world over.

It is a great read with that peculiar British humor humour which The Register is so good at. It is also a good technical overview of techniques for taking advantage of multiple cores.