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I pretty obviously didn't mean that the library designers should just throw out a bunch of stuff to see what gets used. Re-entrant locks seem to fall into the same design space that memory checking in debug C runtimes does: you never want to need to use it but if you do need to use it you want it to be there. Designing for the perfect case is poor design, imho, because we live in an imperfect world.

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The difference is that memory checking in debug C runtimes doesn't paper over your mistake: instead it breaks your program reliably so that you know you have a mistake. As per the linked article, "While recursive mutexes may seem a convenience for debugging, in fact it's the opposite -- you're better off with a "strict" debugging mutex (like the POSIX error-check attribute) that checks, tracks, and enforces ownership restrictions a "normal" mutex may ignore in favor of runtime efficiency."

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