PThreads Programming

Preface

It’s been quite a while since the people from whom we get our project assignments accepted the excuse “Gimme a break! I can only do one thing at a time!” It used to be such a good excuse, too, when things moved just a bit slower and a good day was measured in written lines of code. In fact, today we often do many things at a time. We finish off breakfast on the way into work; we scan the Internet for sports scores and stock prices while our application is building; we’d even read the morning paper in the shower if the right technology were in place!

Being busy with multiple things is nothing new, though. (We’ll just give it a new computer-age name, like multitasking, because computers are happiest when we avoid describing them in anthropomorphic terms.) It’s the way of the natural world—we wouldn’t be able to write this book if all the body parts needed to keep our fingers moving and our brains engaged didn’t work together at the same time. It’s the way of the mechanical world—we wouldn’t have been able to get to this lovely prefabricated office building to do our work if the various, clanking parts of our automobiles didn’t work together (most of the time). It’s the way of the social and business world—three authoring tasks went into the making of this book, and the number of tasks, all happening at once, grew exponentially as it went into its review cycles and entered production.

Computer hardware and operating systems have been capable of multitasking for years. CPUs using ...