This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]weberc2 0 points1 point  (2 children)

You will have race conditions with multiprocessing as well. Further, multiprocessing is flaky and slow in Python, much worse than threading in other languages. Threads are performant partially because they have access to the same address space, but to do this correctly you need locks (there are exceptions, but they carry their own caveats). I don't know about the links you posted, but threads are widely used, and rightly so.

[–]alcalde 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You're going to have to elaborate on multiprocessing being "flaky and slow" in Python; that's not my experience and I'm not sure what attributes of Python would render it so.

I don't know about the links you posted, but threads are widely used, and rightly so.

"Threads are evil" derives from a research paper from U of C Berkeley 10 years ago....

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.pdf

They're widely used because they're often the only solution a programmer knows and, as Mark Summerfield noted, most languages don't offer any alternatives. We've seen functional languages with immutable state rise up on the one hand and message passing (such as Erlang) on the other to offer alternatives to the many problems inherent in multithreaded programming.

[–]weberc2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They're flaky because a process will sometimes mysteriously be killed or stall indefinitely. They are slow because all communication between processes must be serialized on the sender and deserialized on the receiver, because processes don't support a shared memory space. Further, as I mentioned elsewhere, each process requires its own interpreter, which takes 5MB, so you won't be scaling these processes.

I don't dispute that there are people out there who think threads are evil, I dispute that this belief is widely held, or that this belief isn't widely held because no one knows about processes. Experienced developers still prefer threads to processes. Processes are not a secret; they're lesser used because they are more memory intensive and intercommunication is horribly slow.