Hello Peter,
PWL> It's all good. I'd not heard of The Rat before. Sounds like an ^^^^^^^ nice Typo :-)))
PWL> What are your thoughts on the whole concurrency issues being debated?
my practical knowledge in this comes from hardware interrupts (mainly digital signal processing) with hard realtime demands. (If you loose an audio sample every one will hear it. The live performing musician will hear a 5ms processing delay, even worse if it's not constant)
This is a very special case. I decided against memory locking to avoid complexity. I use a kind of semaphore for synching but simpler.
The number of processes (5) is manually manageable but barely. Hard realtime constraints are out of the scope of Win/Mac/Linux OS.
Otherwise I clearly lean towards Jason's proposal of
self breakupStructureWith: 10000 ... and no fine grained locking.
But that's because the problem areas I'm concerned with all fall into categories which benefit from this proposal and won't die of excessive copying. But that's no valid argument in the discussion :-) But I tucked away Jason's mail in case I start parallelizing apps.
So I follow the discussion very interested and close and I hope to never have to solve the kind of problems you use as examples :-).
If I have to, First thing I'll read your suggested book on semaphores. Maybe earlier for fun.
BTW I'm an engineer not a cs person.
Cheers
Herbert mailto:herbertkoenig@gmx.net