[stiglitz]

"12 years ago everyone was wondering how we'd program on multicore CPUs" is either laughable or enlightening to read as an OS developer.

[agentultra]

Even in user space. Electron became de jeur for web developers to build desktop apps. Single threaded memory hogs.

Thankfully many DAWs, video editing, CAD, servers and other useful software saw the value in multi-core workloads.

It’s a thing… just not for web folks most of the time.

[golergka]

Most serious electron based applications are not single threaded.

[rstuart4133]

12 years ago it might have been laughable. But the Core2 Duo was released in 2006, some 7 years before, so the problem was well in hand by then.

But go back 20 years, and you predate Linux RCU. The OS Developers weren't laughing at the problem then.

Arguably the Linux Real Time patches are solving a similar problem, which could be said to be extracting maximum parallelism out of the code. For Real Time this isn't so they can run in parallel, but rather so a higher priority task can interrupt a lower priority one with impunity. Real Time Linux still isn't done yet, although it's getting close.

[bitwize]

> But go back 20 years, and you predate Linux RCU. The OS Developers weren't laughing at the problem then.

I believe it was the DEC Ultrix dev team who, reportedly, amused themselves after hours by making transparencies of Linux source code, projecting them on a screen, cracking open a few beers and having a laugh at the idiot mistakes those college kids made -- mistakes, of course, that you can avoid by choosing a real Unix OS.

It took a while for Linux to actually be taken seriously outside of home-lab tinkering.

[spacechild1]

Yeah, s/everyone/webdevs.

Typical audio software, for example, has been multithreaded since the 90s (simply because the audio callback and the GUI must run in different threads). And in the mid 2000s these threads started to run on different CPUs.

[tbrownaw]

There was certainly a lot of noise about it.

[tdeck]

I was a freshman CS student in 2010-2011 and we learned multi-threaded programming in our first year.

[varjag]

Sure but you would have learned it in 1995 too.

[aa-jv]

Threads are but one way to handle the concurrency/parallelism problem on a given set of processors, old or new.

So what are some other ways of handling multi-core code that you were taught?