Rob Pike's Newsqueak - some good concepts

[Mikola Lysenko]

Concurrent programming has enormous applications, but it has yet to gain much mainstream traction yet.  Partly because present implementations are inefficient, and partly because there is a substantial knowledge barrier to entry.

This is a shame, since you can easily write all sorts of programs extremely elegantly.  Especially interactive applications and simulations, such as games, webapps, databases, fluid dynamics code etc.

Right now, it is possible to write CSP-style programs in D.  DCSP already does all of these things discussed in this talk, though the structure has more in common with occam than Newsqueak.  You can check it out at:

http://assertfalse.com

Part of the problem with CSP-style languages is that implementing a non-deterministic choice operator or 'guarded' select is that it is very difficult.  Frankly, the version in DCSP is rather slow and unnecessarily limited.  In the future, I hope to address these issues, but I won't be able to do any work until I finish up my current projects.

-Mik