Re: [ANNOUNCE] CGit v0.1-pre

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Dec 11, 2006, 17:33 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0612110929510.12500@woody.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0612110859200.12500@woody.osdl.org>

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> 
> The point is, if you have races, you will hit them _occasionally_. It may 
> not be a performance problem in real life, BUT:

Side note: another problem with races is that

 - exactly because they are rare, any potential problems they cause are 
   really hard to debug - you may have a hard time reproducing things.

 - some loads may be able to trigger them thanks to very unlucky timing, 
   so even if the problem is "just a theoretical performance issue", 
   sometimes that theoretical performance problem that only happens once 
   in a blue moon ends up happening a _lot_ for a particular user.

I'm probably biased, simply because I've done system programming for so long (and race conditions etc are one of the most common source of subtle bugs), but I've long since come to the very strong opinion that locking is simply too important to not do right.

Even if you can argue that "it doesn't matter" (and you may even be right), I personally tend to just consider dodgy locking to be a serious bug _whether_ it really matters or not.

Just a hangup of mine.