Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes (1995) [pdf]
I started doing massively parallel programming on SGI systems around the time this paper was published. SGI&#x27;s at the time could have 64 CPUs in a single system image, which was very novel. Sun was working on its early multi core workstations, and companies like Cray were pushing different models of distributed computation.<p>This paper came at a time when threads were really painful to work with. POSIX threads were still new and mostly unsupported, so you were stuck with whatever your OS exposed. On IRIX, you would do threads yourself by forking and setting up a shared memory pool, on Solaris, you had the best early pthread support, in Java, you used the native Thread classes which only really worked on Solaris at the time. It was a mess!<p>This mess is now solved. Pthreads are everywhere, C++ has std::thread, Java threads work everywhere, and we&#x27;ve had many new language some out which handle parallelism beautifully - for example, the consumer&#x2F;producer model built into channels in Go is very elegant. The odd one out is Win32, but it&#x27;s close enough to pthreads for the same concepts to apply.<p>Event driven programming has also become threaded, this is how the whole reactive family of frameworks, node.js, etc, handle parallelism.<p>As someone who&#x27;s been doing this for a long time, what I find confusing is higher level constructs that try to hide the notion of asynchronous operations, such as futures, promises. As a concept, they&#x27;re fine, but they&#x27;re difficult to debug because most developer tools seem not to care about making debugging threads easier.