Sam Roberts wrote:
>>But now they must support it. There are to many important blocking
>>libraries they must use. Oracles DB driver has a non blocking
>>interface but AFAIK there is nothing for MySQL or Interbase
>>and i'm 100% that there is nothing like this for Sqllite.
> 
> Ok, I start to see. Most of the demand that I've seen for "real"/os
> native threads seemed to be based around the assumption that they
> were in some way "better" than ruby's threads, based around io
> multiplexing. It wasn't very convincing.
> 
> The Sqllite API is a lot more convincing! So, in summary,
> native threads are useful for writing C extensions to:
> 
> - blocking APIs, like you mention above
> 
> - APIs that use threads as part of their interface -- doesn't gnome/gtk
>   make extensive use of threading?

Also, don't forget another benefit of OS/kernel threads: SMP.

Basically, threads are used for paralellism and only OS/kernel threads 
provide true paralellism.

-- 
dave