The future of concurrent programming

[Sean Kelly]

Henrik wrote:
> 
> I know concurrent programming has been a frequent topic in the D community forums, so I would be interested to hear the community’s opinions on this. What will the future of parallel programming look like? 
> Are new concepts and tools that support parallel programming needed, or just a new way of thinking? Will the “old school” programming languages fade away, as some seem to suggest, to be replaced by HOFL:s (Highly Optimized Functional Languages)? Where will/should D be in all this? Is it a doomed language if it does incorporate an efficient way of dealing with this (natively)?

It won't be via explicit threading, mutexes, etc.  I suspect that will 
largely be left to library programmers and people who have very specific 
requirements.  I'm not sure that we've seen the new means of concurrent 
programming yet, but there are a lot of options which have the right 
idea (some of which are 40 years old).  For now, I'd be happy with a 
version of CSP that works in-process as easily as it does across a 
network (this has come up in the Tango forums in the past, but we've all 
been too busy with the core library to spend much time on such things). 
  Transactions are another idea, though the common implementation of 
software transactional memory (cloning objects and such) isn't really 
ideal.  I think this will initially be most useful for fairly low-level 
work--kind of an LL/SC on steroids.


Sean