Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] mutex madness
From: Paul Barton-Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: pe loka 01 1999 - 16:35:48 EDT
>Here's a derivative question... is there such a thing as a realtime OS
>that is usable by application developers who don't want to have to think
>at such a low level?
i afraid that in general, if you want to use multiple threads and/or
realtime scheduling, these kinds of issues will likely have to dealt
with explicitly one way or another. you might get lucky, and find the
"defaults" of a given thread system and the OS scheduler work for you,
but the chances of that are low.
Parallel programming is *hard*. People don't do consciously controlled
things in parallel (though we're good at multitasking :), and writing
software that does is a real challenge. Many people have tried to
write languages that cover up all the hard stuff, but to the best of
knowledge, none of them really succeed in their goals.
>Conversations about the "evils" of using conditional
>code, for example, make me as an application-level developer lose
>interest.
if (!if_is_ok) {
goto new_language_or_processor;
}
BTW, several important DSP chips don't have conditional instructions
at all. Fast ? Yes. Useful ? That's a long story ...
--p
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : pe maalis 10 2000 - 07:27:12 EST