

Why Windows Threads Are Better Than POSIX Threads - smanek
http://softwareblogs.intel.com/2006/10/19/why-windows-threads-are-better-than-posix-threads/

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xirium
Article summary: Programming Windows threads is easier because there are less
datatypes and therefore less functions to learn.

I disagree with this. If you're doing multi-threaded programming then you've
already reached a certain level of complexity and you're probably concerned
about performance. An larger threading API is the least of your concerns. I
also find it humorous that some of the comments state that POSIX threads on
Windows are slower. How would you implement POSIX threads on Windows other
than using the Windows threading API? How could this ever match performance?

For an objective comparison, I refer to some very vague and outdated
performance statistics from QNX. A long time ago, QNX had a benchmark to
showed that Windows could perform 10,000 context switches per second, Linux
could perform 100,000 context switches per second and QNX could perform
400,000 context switches per second on the same hardware, which was
approximately 100MHz Pentium specification.

Parties including IBM have made significant improvements to Linux. This would
close the gap between Linux and QNX. However, I find it hard to believe that
Windows could outperform Linux on the basis that Windows has to support some
awful legacy code with complete binary compatability.

