Concurrency

janderson askme at me.com
Fri Dec 15 01:21:25 PST 2006


Sean Kelly wrote:
> Graham St Jack wrote:
>> janderson wrote:
>>> Given that the world of PC are heading down the path of muti-cpus:
>>>
>>> What features does D supply to take advantage of concurrency, over an 
>>> above what can be accomplished though C++ today?
>>>
>>> How could the language be improved to be better at concurrency 
>>> problems then other languages?
>>>
>>> (You'll not that I left out the word threading as that is only one 
>>> form of concurrency programming).
>>>
>>> -
>>> I'm just thinking that, perhaps if concurrency is handled well enough 
>>> in D, it can catch the wave of parallel programming that is on the 
>>> horizon.
>>
>> I agree that D should have more support for concurrency. Putting some 
>> sensible support into the language is FAR better than trying to do it 
>> all with libraries.
> 
> I think the problem is that this is a developing field, and language 
> additions tend to be somewhat permanent.  Sutter's futures, for example, 
> could benefit from a bit of language support (the active object part), 
> but I'm not convinced the idea is quite "there" yet.  And something like 
> what's in Cilk may be more mature but seems a bit too much for D. Better 
> language support for concurrency will have to be a 2.0 thing, if only to 
> allow more time for experimentation in library code.
> 
> 
> Sean

This may be the case, however it would be worth investigating other 
languages (in particular ones designed around concurrency).  Maybe the 
solution will be a library with D simply providing support to make the 
library easier to use then it otherwise would be.  I'm not sure. 
Something I think needs to be discussed.

What are the best and newest parallel languages out there?   What are 
the most difficult parts to solve?

What are the best libraries?  What are the hardest parts to use in those 
libraries?

I'm particularly interested if the difficult parts of lockless 
programming supported in some form.

-Joel



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