Are Native Threads Worth It?

With the advent of multi-core CPUs concurrency is becoming more important, but is traditional threading the way to go? The problem is that traditional threading is very difficult to get right. I am sure that are some cowboys out there who will respond to that last sentence by saying that “real programmers” don’t have a problem with current threading models. Machismo aside, I have seen many smart, capable programmers write multithreaded code that deadlocks or corrupts data (including one of the aforementioned “real programmers”). Last month, there was an article on InfoQ the provided a good overview of the debate about threading in Ruby.