Re:Threads Are a Bad Idea for Most Purposes (1995) [pdf]
by rcurry on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:47PM
(#22177169)
I worked for a major day trading software company back in 1999 or so and we built everything around NT. I had come from a Unix background, but to be honest NT was the perfect choice at the time for building the back end of a large-scale retail trading platform. And IO completion ports were amazing compared to what was available on other platforms.
More than a year later we were trying to port much of the codebase to solaris and it was a nightmare. Pretty much nothing worked right so we ended up bolting on the fork/mmap abstraction on top of much of it and building our own lock wrapper. While we sorta got it working, the solaris port died for internal political reasons and the NT version took off and we never looked back.
NT was designed out of the gate for heavily threaded/async workloads, that stuff wasn't bolted on like pretty much every unix clone in existence.