"Luke Kanies" <luke / madstop.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag 
news:Pine.GSO.4.60.0505201455550.20592 / kirby.madstop.com...
> On Sat, 21 May 2005, Sam Roberts wrote:
>
>> Whats wrong with threads? Its a good answer.
>
> Well, there are at least two problems with threads:  I've never done them 
> before and I hope not to have to learn them just to do this relatively 
> simple piece, and second they do add another dimension of complexity, one 
> which I must always be at least somewhat aware.  Given that, as I 
> mentioned, I'm a newbie to threads, this does not fill me with confidence.

Yeah, but

 - there's quite some resources out there to learn from

 - you will have to at some point in time

 - but most important so: your application won't work without concurrency on 
your nodes; it's an application requirement.  It doesn't matter whether you 
do that with threads or processes, you need the concurrency.  And 
concurrency always needs some form of synchronization.  I'd say Ruby threads 
and synchronization are easier to learn that what different OS provide in 
terms of semaphores, locks, mutexes etc.  And once you get the basic 
concepts it's probably not that difficult to transfer that to some other 
implementation / technology.

>> Taking a guess, in case you are worried, they aren't real threads, its
>> just a very nice wrapper around select().
>
> Yah, I know that they aren't real threads, but I believe they still come 
> with some of the problems that I would have with real threads.

Like you having to learn them?

Kind regards

    robert