Re: read-write locks

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/05/2017 12:47 PM, Torvald Riegel wrote:
> If gnulib really wants to make concurrency simpler, than it should look
> at higher-level abstractions first.  Especially parallelism.  But maybe
> it should then just wait for what C++ specifies, or contribute to that

I'm afraid this overestimates the amount of development resources we
have. Gnulib is contributed to only fitfully, and it mostly consists of
reasonably simple portability hacks. It has to be that way, otherwise
package developers won't understand and trust it. It's not a suitable
place to do concurrency research.

Concurrency with shared memory is a hard problem, and the C++ (and C)
folks have messed it up for decades. Although they may get something
reasonable eventually, in the meantime Gnulib will probably prefer to
limp along with something on the safer side of the axis.