alt Hacker NewsIt seems like we forgot about lightweight fibers for about 30 years and then collectively rediscovered it in about 2010. sure, Java did green threads, but not like m:n stuff.
I sometimes wonder where we would be now if people would have gone "Wow, mr Reppy! concurrentML is so cool!" in 1993.
instead we got pthreads and collective amnesia and later we got go's girly times and channels which are only half way there.
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Back then you could spend 6 months making something twice as fast, or wait six months for computers to become twice as fast. People obviously did the latter.
It also became a cycle: People write single threaded code -> CPUs/OSs optimize performance/ergonomics for single threaded programs -> People write single threaded code ->...
It wasn't until scaling slowed down that interest/investment in concurrency/parallelism took off.
Yet the average software engineer hasn’t heard or Carl Hewitt, Joe Armstrong, has never programmed in an Actor Programming model, and dont even know what it is.
That's because they are very rarely useful. This was true then and it's still true now. There's just not many workloads where it makes sense to need to rapidly launch a thread that doesn't need to do much of anything but does need to exist for a while before terminating.
What is useful is the state machine aspects of things like coroutines or async/await, but those aren't quite fibers and very much aren't M:N threading. A major use of them is in UI where they have strict thread requirements even.