Good demo for showing benefits of parallelism

[Joel C. Salomon]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> Kevin Bealer wrote:
>> Then the question comes: why (and if) message passing / futures are 
>> better than Thread and Mutex.  Herb Sutter argues that it is hard to 
>> design correct code using locks and primitives like sleep/pause/mutex, 
>> and that it gets a lot harder with larger systems.
> 
> I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you here.  CSP is built around 
> message passing and was invented in the late 70s.  And IIRC the agent 
> model was designed in the early 60s.

The Plan 9 threads library 
(<http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/thread>, ported to UNIX 
and available from <http://swtch.com/plan9port/>), the (defunct) 
language Alef, and the Limbo language on the Inferno system are all 
based on the CSP model.  Beginning C programmers can write deadlock-free 
programs that usefully exploit concurrency.

For God’s sake don’t copy the Java model…

--Joel