I regularly spawn several thousands of threads in the C++ servers I write, and they perform well. At least 40% of FAANG companies just reduce the size of their per-thread stacks. "Thread per-connection" works just fine, and when you need to go faster, thread pools work even better without coloring all your functions.
There is an extremely small set of domains where simple threading doesn't suffice, and async/await is too high a price to pay across the entire software ecosystem just to slightly optimize those domains.
> OS threads are expensive: an operating system thread typically reserves a megabyte of stack space and takes roughly a millisecond to create.
It's typically less than a hundred kilobytes and (on the systems I've benchmarked using std::thread) it takes 60usec (wall time in userspace) to create and destroy a thread.
Threads have gotten so fast that paying the async function coloring price makes very little sense for most software.
My biggest problem with less(1) is that the regex engine is unreasonably slow. When processing large files, I frequently need to search with grep (or more recently, rip-grep) with large -A/-B buffers, and then pipe that through less, because the regex engine in less won't find what I want on any reasonable time scale.
It is most definitely not an overstatement. I have over 425 hours in Hollow Knight. I stopped playing Silksong in 8 because it felt like unfun masochism.
> In the grander scheme of things, it can be seen as an anti-solution.
Every person who has adequate preparations for themselves and their family is a person who who's allowing societal resources to go to someone else in greater need. It's one less person standing in line for water and food after a disaster.
Far from an anti-solution, it provides distributed herd immunity.
There is an extremely small set of domains where simple threading doesn't suffice, and async/await is too high a price to pay across the entire software ecosystem just to slightly optimize those domains.