Hardware threads are a thing.

Other than in the sense of SMT (Hyper-Threading)? I don't think so. Threads are a software concept.

One can distinguish between native (OS) threads and green (language-runtime) threads which may use a different context-switching mechanism. But that's more of a spectrum in terms of thread-safety; similar to how running multiple threads on a single CPU core without SMT, single CPU core with SMT, multiple CPU cores, with different possible CPU cache coherency guarantees, create a spectrum of possible thread-safety issues.

▲

zozbot234 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Runtime-switched tasks cannot lead to memory unsafety unless multiple OS threads are involved, because that's the only case where torn writes are possible. And a typical configuration of Go will not be running multiple OS threads unless multiple hardware threads (aka "logical cores", "virtual processors" etc.) are available.

▲

layer8 3 days ago | parent [-]

Thread-safety isn’t just about word tearing. It’s also about state invariants in your program. Even if all your threads are green threads on the same OS thread, you still have to guard critical sections that check-and-modify, or that temporarily break the invariants of state that is observable by other threads, when there’s anything in-between that may lead to a context switch. Otherwise, while you may be free of word tearing, you might still have “torn” program state.

On a single-core CPU, word tearing may similarly be absent between OS threads, but you still have to guard any critical section.

I agree with user swiftcoder that there are concurrency issues (like the above) even in the absence of hardware parallelism, or of multiple OS threads (which by themselves don’t imply hardware parallelism). I disagree that “thread-safety” isn’t an appropriate term for them. Those issues are part of what thread-safety was always about.

	▲	swiftcoder 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think my contention is that a lot of programmers don't think about thread-safety in those terms - if I write a purely single-threaded program, thread-safety seems like the kind of thing that I don't have to care about (when in reality, the fact that various OS-provided features like signals exist, mean that all software has to deal with concurrency issues)

▲

4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]