Apples and Oranges. How books can mislead our thinking process.¶
I’ve just began to read the book “Twisted Network Programming”… Twisted is a popular framework for networking programming. However, I’d probably skim most of the Book. I’m sorry… But as it happens, in the second page of the second chapter (the one that I began with) they show an illustration on “Comparing single-threaded, multithreaded, and event-driven program flow”.
Hum… apples and oranges. I mean the thread model of a program will have some impact on how events are dealt with, but are they truly comparable or the sole responsibles for the program flow?
Diesel is usually ran in a single thread and so is Tornado. You may, of course, run programs written with them in multiple processes (or threads) to avoid contention when the volume of clients (events) is too high.
Even with a single thread most of the time the system is waiting for the IO buffers to have data, so they can be classified as event-driven: They actually response to events.
But what really bothers about this illustration is not that it compare two thing that could be (and should be made) complementary. What bothers me is that the picture tries to fool me by showing that event-driven programs don’t have any “gaps” of idle time between tasks, while the threaded models do. And that’s simply dishonest.
Probably this is not what the authors meant, and I’m probably going prejudiced just because of this wrong picture. However, I go to a book like this not for pleasure but for information. Finding a piece of data that is not trustworthy raises a flag and I start to read with a magnifying glass… And that’s not fun either.
Don’t expect me to finish this book.
Update of a couple of hours later…
A few lines below the illustration of matters, they actually say:
“The event-driven version of the program interleaves the execution of the three tasks, but in a single thread of control.”
So, let’s give it another try.